Adventure!

What you are seeing here is an extreme close up of tree bark, the kind a Ponderosa Pine grows. If you stick your nose into one of these deep ol' cracks in the bark, you can smell something sweet. The whole debate right now is whether it smells like butterscotch or vanilla. I'd tell you my opinion, but I don't think it would be good for my popularity on the blogs if I chose sides!

Anyway if you can see the real dark color on the outer edges of the picture, you can? Oh good. Well, thats because the bark has been harmed by a fire. Though the tree lives on. Ponderosa's are generally quite fire resistant once they are mature.

My roommate Laura and I went bushwhacking yesterday. It sure was fun and challenging. We parked the car on a paved road in the Garnet Mountains and set out, moving as close to south as we could at eleven in the am. We had no map, compass, flashlight, knife, clock, or matches and we just went by sense of direction courtesy of the bright sun in the blue sky. But as our shiny friend moved it got a little bit tricky sometimes! There are other clues that help you determine the cardinal directions, such as species composition on slopes of different aspects. And careful mental record keeping as you march, always having a little compass arrow in your brain that points to the car.

As we went south, we crossed trails, but rarely followed them. We used X's made of sticks to show where we crossed a trail so that on the way back north we could go up and down a trail we crossed and find an X and then keep going as close to due north from that as we could. We
got utterly turned around once or twice and I was amazed at how my mind was unaccustomed to this kind of navigation. It took a lot of concentration to remember where we had been, think of what landmarks would look like from the other side, and to figure out what order things had happened in. For instance I thought we went under the fence and then watched the leaves fall off of alders in a gully, but Laura thought it was the other way around.

Another time, we hiked along some impressive cliffs, and I was certain that the hill we were going to across the river was in fact the hill we were coming from. Laura had to convince me. I don't know how my mind got totally turned around like that. It's like there was something flipped in my memory, I remembered turning right where she remembered going left. I conceded to her because judging by the sun, I was clearly wrong. Scary to think about what would have happened if I had been alone!

Our trail was a straight line, the northern point was our car, the southern point was a clear cut ridge several miles away. We couldn't see either point from the other. And only decided to try for the ridge after we had already bushwhacked quite a ways. The ridge always seemed so close. It took much longer to get there than we thought and every time we thought about turning around we looked up the slope and decided to push on, because it looked like it was going to be just a short walk. Well that slope kept on climbing and she and I were both taking clothes off and sweating and we didn't talk much because all I wanted to say was "I hate climbing mountains." and I didn't think it would be a positive thing to bring up at the time considering we were climbing a mountain. We were tired and hungry and worried about daylight when we were on the final climb.
"Should we turn around?" Laura asked.
"But we're so close. I bet there's a palace made of golden trees on the other side!" I replied.

and we kept going. Finally we lumbered up onto the top of the ridge. It was bisected by a barbed wire fence that we helped each other through and it was clearcut. There were noxious weeds all over the place. Then trying to be optimistic I said, "Hey, there's the golden palace!"

Indeed there was a cluster of golden larches brilliantly standing among the green of doug fir on the opposite slope to the south. But I was interrupted in my sentence by the loud distant mooing of a cow, among whose shit we were standing. We laughed at ourselves for assuming we'd find something great on that ridge. Laura thought it was a Buddhist story. The journey is the reward after all.

Its true so far it had been pretty rewarding, but what about the return journey. Every step we had taken farther from the car was one more step to get back, and another chance to get lost.

At one point when we were resting on the disappointing ridgetop which was our final destination, Laura asked me what time I thought we'd get back. I said 6:03 she said 7:00. We had no clock with us. Then we started back and struggled through the mental challenges of picking a course and being tired and foodless in an area where neither one of us had been before.

Well we never found out who was right about which came first, the fence or the alders because we accidentally went the wrong way on our return journey! We didn't go over the fence or through the alders at all and we got pretty confused about that, but we just kept going north trusting the sun. Our X's helped immensely and we found them one by one with some effort and searching. The whole time we kept comparing notes, talking about where we thought we were and where we thought each option would take us. Whenever we disagreed, we stopped and conferred and figured it out.

We were right every time, and though we went at least three miles away from the car with no trail, map, or compass, and with a return route that was somewhat different than the way we set out, we made it back exactly to the car. All we had to do was cross the street and hop in.

I opened her cell phone to check the time. It was 6:23 pm. Almost exactly between our two estimates. We're good.

Though to be honest we both talked it over and agreed that we wouldn't have been able to do it alone. We also agreed that we wouldn't have gone as many miles or had as much fun if we were alone! What a great day!