(no subject)
Last weekend: hiking at Lake Placid. I drove down late Saturday night and stayed in a hotel; it was 2h of driving, and 30 minutes at the border where, despite it being midnight, they had three lanes open with three cars ahead of me each. Officious nonsense before I could get in the country, then I picked up an envelope from the door to the hotel where they trusted everything would just work out.
At the crack of dawn on Sunday I met up with Emilie and Tyson at the airport. Their flight was scheduled for 7:30 but you know how airlines are, they only landed at 7:50.
We aimed to hike up Algonquin Peak, which I'd heard about before. At this spot, Tyson who was a few steps behind me called out to say "there should be a trail junction just ahead, let's make sure we don't miss it." Then he looked up from his map. We made a slight error. Algonquin, we basically knew, was shrouded in cloud. We didn't know but could guess that it was also rather icy; nothing impassable but you had to be careful all the time (which is something Emilie is not -- and we all lost footing at one point or another). We had the option of going up a lesser peak which was below the clouds, but we pressed on.
As we got higher, we got to see a fair bit of frozen precipitate blown on to the trees. We stopped just shy of the peak, at a point where lots of people were slowed by an icy scramble over a rock. Given the lots of people, we traded camera favours; here's our group.
On the way down, I snapped the obfungus of the day. Then bumped in to a couple who I'd met at a party on Friday. It then clicked as to why, at the party, they had been talking about shopping in the states, and also talking about the 'dacks: he had his bright shiny new plastic mountaineering boots on that he was breaking in.
At the crack of dawn on Sunday I met up with Emilie and Tyson at the airport. Their flight was scheduled for 7:30 but you know how airlines are, they only landed at 7:50.
We aimed to hike up Algonquin Peak, which I'd heard about before. At this spot, Tyson who was a few steps behind me called out to say "there should be a trail junction just ahead, let's make sure we don't miss it." Then he looked up from his map. We made a slight error. Algonquin, we basically knew, was shrouded in cloud. We didn't know but could guess that it was also rather icy; nothing impassable but you had to be careful all the time (which is something Emilie is not -- and we all lost footing at one point or another). We had the option of going up a lesser peak which was below the clouds, but we pressed on.
As we got higher, we got to see a fair bit of frozen precipitate blown on to the trees. We stopped just shy of the peak, at a point where lots of people were slowed by an icy scramble over a rock. Given the lots of people, we traded camera favours; here's our group.
On the way down, I snapped the obfungus of the day. Then bumped in to a couple who I'd met at a party on Friday. It then clicked as to why, at the party, they had been talking about shopping in the states, and also talking about the 'dacks: he had his bright shiny new plastic mountaineering boots on that he was breaking in.