Inevitably when camping you forget something inconsequential, extra shirts, soap, cutlery, your favorite vegetable, but rarely the routes you planned on navigating through and novels that escape the folds of the mountain that contain you, we did both.
No compass was necessary on our first intrepid route, Hal loathed Hamilton Lake, the first 800 meters enroute to Emerald Peak. Winds tinged the surface rippling wisps of feathery waves as we contoured its edges. Turquoise waters enticed me, tempted me oh! so eagerly, as my fingers dance notes just below the surface with a stark cold compelling retreat, that glacial waters and my body repel one another. Angling upwards towards the ridge we thought brought us to the summit, the description that we had rehearsed to memory warned us about false apexes. Larger and larger boulders grounded our anticipation till huge rocks forced us to perform body contortions to maneuver through a final chimney. Alas! Hal could eat his Spanish chorizo, peanut butter rolls, and a hidden beer in his pack.
One of our loves from childhood onwards is attending the nightly Parks talks at the Amphitheatre. Tonight show was Practising Biologist ~ we became the guinea pigs, as we wandered from station to station solving the Parks problems from bears eating grain on the railroad ~ their highest mortality, to looking for signs of animal presence ~ there were 13 of them, can you guess? Listening to bats cry, matching skulls to animals on a chart, and finally viewing animals prints and figuring out what movement they were doing at the time. Thoroughly engaged, we fell asleep as each night with a podcast. A man named Peter Bergman ~ aka and unknown soul - arrived in Sligo, Ireland, stayed at the local hotel and within 4 days dispersed of all his belonging out of view of CCTB and was found dead on the Ross Strand in 2009 and he didn't drown, to date his identity and death are a mystery.
Day 2 started a little slower....the temperatures were high, thus the 4 liters of water towing my back down was necessary..... a new accommodation (burden) I've had to adapt to in the last year. Figuring that we wanted to do a challenging hike tomorrow we thought...foolishly that Mount Field would be easy day. Never doubt that 1365 meter gain with route finding challenges one. Heavy clouds brought comfort to my dwindling water supply after the first 900 meters. Scree varies from pebbles to large stones, when the former brings us to feebles fools when every step forward, slides 2 back, our vernacular changes from the brilliant spectacle in front of us to grunting hounds. Up top we stayed only a short time for fear of being showered with lightning bolts and downclimbing slippery hard scree.
The next day we did 2 short hikes with still amounted to 6 hours, so much for sitting around drinking beer, eating Hal's favorites ~ Hawking's, my licorice, and our grub.....no no we had to grasp the opportunity to seek out Wapta Falls and Emerald Basin.
My concern is heat... menopause...I create my own chinooks, mother nature just messes with me further.
No comments:
Post a Comment