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July 15, 2002
2 good outdoor things i've
2 good outdoor things i've done to counteract the bartime
saturday we hiked up to harding icefield. the icefield is pretty damn unique, it's kind of like a bowl of ice spilling out through the holes in the mountains that make up the bowl that it's in. good sentence dan. if you took out all the ice you could fill the yosemite valley 1000 times, at places it's a mile deep, one of the last remnants of the iceage. which means it really makes you feel small.
we set out at 1 oclock, opting to hike the river bed instead of paying the 3 dollar parks' charge, which added an extra mile. the trip up was a good hike, not as steep as alice mountain, which is good cause my buddies, all smokers, didn't cough up any lungs or internal organs. it's funny how when you're hiking and you see people ahead of them you get this weird need to have to pass them. or i do anyways, it's kinda dumb but i can't help it. so we tore up the mountain, stopping at halfway to look out over the exit glacier, which looked to me like a giant tongue licking down into the end of the resurrection river valley. it was tundra after we got above the tree line, and i hummed modest mouse songs to myself. near the top the snow was all around, we chose not to have any snowball fights but instead powered on to the top, where we looked out at what should have been the glorious harding icefield, but was instead a giant bank of fog. i was less then impressed. well, we sat around for half an hour and talked about our upcoming backpacking trip (7 days from the town of hope back to seward, 80 miles over resurrection pass and along the resurrection river, that's gonna rule), the fog and clouds suddenly blew through and we looked out at the expanse of the icefield, aaron likened it to a huge snow desert.
we sat up there, staring at the peaks dotting the icefield, then started down. since dave had been up here before, he'd advised us to bring waterproof pants or garbage bags or something slippery, and we used them to slide on our butts down the patches of snow along the side of the trail. it was great fun, i felt like a toboggan. that took us to the halfway point quite faster then our legs had brought us up. a few hundred meters down the trail from there, we met a couple who warned us of a mother black bear with two cubs a quarter mile below the trail. naturally we raced down hoping for a chance to see her, and at a bend in the trail she emerged with her cubs. we were below the bend and watched up as she worked her way down, i would say she weighed about 200-250, not terribly big. the cubs had big ears that peeked over the bushes she left them at, and then tumbled down after her. the closest she came was about 30 meters, when another hiker whistled at her and she lumbered off in the other direction down. it was really cool. from there we made our way to the bottom, mike falling only once and scraping himself up, but luckily not hurting his ankle again. all in all a damn good hike.
no time left on this machine, later on i'll blather a bit about the sea kayaking i did yesterday, which was really damn fun as well. tomorrow, last day of work, unless i volunteer to dish for wednesday and thursday, since they don't have anyone and my friends don't get here to take me up to girdwood till thursday night anyways. less then a month till i breeze back (briefly) through reno, where i here it reached 108 degrees, which makes me smile at the cold wind up here. adios.
Posted by bendan at July 15, 2002 01:31 PM
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