Thank you Ann! Yeah, these are from the good camera...RAW files...can't process 'em until I get home. I was pretty eager to see the sunset pictures, and they turned out well. Plus the flowers...they were really impressive in real life.
My good buddy Cory, who I did so much of this hike with this year, has returned home due to an injured hamstring muscle. On the upside, he's getting to spend quality time with his grandson, who we talked about often on the trail. There is something special in the grandparent relationship, and I haven't seen it so clearly until getting to know Cory. I'm happy that he's making lemonade with the lemons life have him just now...
Well... It is finished. It feels anti climactic! Like... My whole consciousness is oriented around walking all day long every day, unless it is a glorious rest day, which means doing the absolute minimum of chores and maximum of laying down. There wasn't room for much else. In the end it is simple...I had to finish what I said I would do. I learned that the thing I was doing had no magic, really. All of that romance and sparkle existed only in my dreams about the thing. This doesn't mean the thing has no value. It probably has more value than the thoughts about it. I know that binding myself to the task of it means something, though I don't yet know if it diminished me through depletion or gave me something worth having... Or neither of those. Perhaps I'm both tired and burdened by something unnecessary. But somehow I think that is unlikely. I only know I held on and stuck it out even as I lost what "it" is. Can the will burn up it's object? It seems so. ...
I came down or of the Northern San Juans to Silverton. Just before dropping steeply into a deep, carved valley, I sat for a last look around on a high tundra ridge. I opened my umbrella to block the wind around my feet, which were getting cold despite the sun. Thinking I was pretty clever, I attached my camera to the umbrella to hold it down against gusts of wind. Ha! As I put my shoes on and closed up my backpack, a string gust lifted umbrella and camera high up into the air, and with a cry of alarm I watched them floating away off to the east! First pinning everything down, I started running up and over a rise to hopefully retrieve my precious gear when it came down. It was a fifteen minute journey with heart in throat, lungs pounding, but finally I reached a snowfield where the camera had wrapped around one side of a penitente (a little tower of snow sculpted by the wind) and the umbrella around the other side. Thank God! Otherwise... No more pictures! After this, I scur...
WAUW! Super nice pictures!
ReplyDeleteThank you Ann! Yeah, these are from the good camera...RAW files...can't process 'em until I get home. I was pretty eager to see the sunset pictures, and they turned out well. Plus the flowers...they were really impressive in real life.
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