Tags
After my first hike this year, the next two days were wet. Good days to stay inside watching leaves blow and deer graze while catching up on my reading. Later in the week I indulged into two more lovely hikes, expanding my range considerably.
It was a gorgeous, crisp morning for an eight-mile+ walk in the woods. Hiking in snow is like reading a mystery. Footprints narrate the lives of creatures large and small that pass through the night.
The higher in elevation I went, the more patches of snow dotted the trees.
And the higher I went, the longer the sun had been working on those patches of snow which let loose in the form of little ice balls that clunked me on the head. The sky is falling! 😂 Throughout portions of this forest a familiar, but unknown to me smell lodged in pockets along the trail. Best way I can describe it is a smelly feet smell. I used to think it was the scent of nearby wildlife. Then someone told me it was the scent of a particular shrub, but I saw none of those shrubs in this area. It’s a forest mystery to me.
The next day, I hiked a bit further up a completely different drainage trail with very little elevation gain. It was thrilling to me to realize that before I turned back to the car, I was just six miles from Loon Lake, a very popular hike/bike ride out of McCall.
Frost encrusted plant just steps away from a hardy strawberry still toughing it out.
Evidence of hard lives lived. I love stumbling on finds like this and contemplating who inhabited the place. How long did they stay? Did they leave richer or poorer, in health or in sickness?
Beside beautiful Ruby Meadows, the unmistakable and brutal evidence of what the ol’ geezers from the sunken cabin were after. The scars placer mining wreaks on the earth last way longer than the miners who tore the land apart in search of glitter and gold.
Posted by rangewriter | Filed under Photography, Travel & Adventure