If you need more evidence the thin air was messing with my mind, witness the "I'm King of the World!" photo below, taken at the summit with the aid of my awesome Gorillapod.
Aside: if you tend to do interesting things alone, like hike mountains way out of your league, you should get a Gorillapod. The shots of myself I took on the summit were in a strong wind, but I just wrapped the Gorillapod's legs around a rock and nothing short of a direct lightning strike would move it.
Another aside: no, I am not pregnant and have not gained 40 pounds. I brought a sweatshirt to put on over my hiking shirt and above timber line found I really needed it. The wind is helping to emphasize the boxy, shapeless cut of my ensemble.
After resting for a while and eating a Cherry Bumblebar (Best. Energy. Snack. Ever... and no weird crap in it... gluten-free, too! Hey Bumblebar people, if you need a spokesperson, I am totally there for you. No charge, even. Just throw me a couple Chai and Cherry bars every month and we're good), I started back down.After passing two or maybe five of the false summits, I thought the altitude was messing with my brain again because I looked up ahead from the trail and thought "why is that rock staring at me?"
Yeah, I had that instinctual "something is watching me" hairs up at the back of the neck thing.
Then the rock moved, and I realized it was not yet another white rock (many of the rocks about halfway up to the summit were white). It was a mountain goat mama, with her juvenile!! Look for them in the center foreground of the photo below... and in the background, that lump of mountain taller than the others is Long's Peak, a 14er in Rocky Mountain National Park.
I so totally have no desire to climb it.
Mama Goat and Sproutlicious (is it wrong that I name the baby wildlife I happen across?) ambled on ahead of me on the trail, at my pace, and then stopped to nibble some apparently extra-tasty grass/lichen/wildflowers just off the trail.
They were aware of me but not spooked... I guess the mama saw how slow I was going and thought "fat hobbit is so totally not a threat." The photo below was taken without a zoom, by the way.
Can you stand how adorable Sproutlicious is? As for Mama Goat, she was having a bad hair day, molting or blowing her coat or whatever it's called with mountain goats. And, while I was feeling a little bad that the only three other hikers making the ascent today blew past me and were coming down while I was still going up, I do think that if I had been as fast, I never would have seen these two, a highlight of my hike.
Nearly back to timber line, here's a shot of some Krummholz, the stunted, crooked, wind-ravaged dwarf conifer that grows in lower alpine tundra zones. You can't tell from the photo, but it's only a couple feet high.
Not that that was a particularly exciting shot or anything, but I enjoy saying the word "Krummholz"* aloud so I included it.
(German for "crooked wood.")
And finally, instead of retracing my steps, once below the timber line I took an alternate route through a gorgeous, lush, Lothlorien-like forest to Bottle Pass, where I took the photo below, looking back on where I'd been. That's Bill's Peak on the right, and massive, enormo Byers Peak on the right, with all its false summits.
So, Byers.... is that all you got?
1 comment:
i want to hug that goat.
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