Wow. Just wow.

We went out on our third traverse today. Yesterday was bad, I puked in the morning and then felt like puking for the rest of the day. I wasn't sure if it was heat stroke from the day before or dehydration, or if I was just really messed up. Regardless, I trucked on through, and survived, and today was great. We have been doing road-style traverses, where we drive to a location, hike up a hill, hike down a hill, and then back to the truck. We won't be starting heli-traverses until we get our 8th person here, Larry, and he arrives on Wednesday. 

Today was good though. We hiked up from about 850m to 1208m over about 1.2 km of horizontal. Going up was brutal. Hiking down I can deal with, but the hiking up just makes me feel like I'm out of shape. I have to stop every 5 or 10 minutes. It would be alright if the mosquitos didn't swarm you and fly into your mouth every time you tried to breathe, or if the bush wasn't so bushy. Oh well, it'll get better. The view is beautiful though. I'm trying to upload a panoramic photo I took, but it won't take over the internet right now. Maybe tomorrow. Basically we were overlooking a beautiful river valley with a textbook meandering river, making all these beautiful curvy S-shapes through the bottom of the valley, with a large ridge to the south and the north. If you google-map it, it's the road out from Dease Lake westward to Telegraph Creek, about 10 to 15 km out, the ridge to the north was the one we did today and yesterday, and then on our first day we did the south ridge out to Hloey Lake (there's a bridge over Tanzilla River around the 10km mark, just by a gravel pit. Follow that road until the lakes on the other side of the southern ridge). I would link it, but Google Maps is breaking the internet. Anyways, at some point I'll get that sorted and make a nice little route showing everywhere I've hiked. I've been tracking it on my GPS, so maybe that'll get uploaded at some point. We'll see I suppose.

The bush is brutally overgrown with roses and juniper and all kinds of prickly things to grab onto while you're sliding down a slope. The juniper releases all this dusty-like pollen or something whenever you stand on it. Roses are PAINFUL, I've had to pick out more thorns that I have curse words for. Ouch. And I have sap all over my pants now, and even in my hair. I love this though, it's great. I'm having fun, even though hiking uphill is painful. I'll get into super-awesome shape soon, and then hiking up these things will be like nothing. 

Well, I'm off to bed, another lazy night ahead of me, reading until I pass out (still haven't used my headlamp at ALL), and then getting up at 7am for breakfast.