Duck and Push through the Brush!

Yesterday was bad. I learned the difference between rainproof and stormproof. I own rainproof. It's only waterproof for about 4 hours of sub-horizontal sleet/rain/hail. On the plus side, I did hike to the top of Snow Peak (http://bit.ly/nm2yqo for map, make sure to turn on terrain). We hiked around the ridge, from the NE ridge (around 1550m) to the peak (which is on the middle of the W side) and over to our pickup spot. The downside: we were between two thunderstorms at the peak (and we were fogged in mostly), so we took some quick photos and then left, and it was raining/sleeting so hard that I had to wring out my rain jacket and the fleece I was wearing underneath. Ridiculous. I was concerned we wouldn't be able to get out because of how foggy it was all day. I could see about 20m in front of me for about half the day, and I kept worrying about running into a grizzly there because we'd surprise it. Anyways, it did all work out, we got back to camp to a HUGE turkey dinner, and it was amazing.

Today was beautiful. A bit foggy in the morning, but we flew up above the clouds, and it was beautiful. Especially after yesterday. We were dropped off in a small lake bog. We had to do an real hover exit (because Roben didn't want to get the skids wet). I was third man out, and my trav partner was ankle deep, unloading the cargo. You're supposed to gently move your weight onto the skid, and then transfer your weight from the skid to the ground in a nice smooth motion, so that the pilot can compensate and keep control. That is extremely difficult when you a)can't find the bottom of the puddle you're supposed to be standing in, b)are in water over the top of your boots and nearing the top of your gaiters and c) just spent the entire previous night making sure your boots were dry for trav today. I guess the good thing is that after starting your day off doing the doggy-paddle, things can't really get much worse.
We were supposed to be hiking up a creek, but we booked it for high ground, because the bushes were super wet after the rain last night so we were soaked (even after our swim). The bush was so thick, we made it about 1km before lunch at 12:30. I wish I was making this up. 3 hours to go 1km. We had about 4km on our trav, which was heading up about 500m of vertical, so not too bad. The only tricky part was that we had 4 creeks to cross with ridges between them all, so we did a lot of up-down-creek-up-down-creek today. The creeks were nice, because we could refill our water bottles and soak our headband/bandanna. We made it onto the ridge we were walking on at about 3pm, and then booked it up to our pickup spot. The tough part of being out here is that there aren't many good pickup spots, as it's so brushy. We had to make it to the top of the ridge, where it connected the other ridge, otherwise we weren't going to get picked up. We did make it, but we had about 5 minutes to spare (mostly because we set out late because of fog today).

However....we did see lots of neat mushrooms. These ones were 'vegan pancakes' (as I like to call them), or Boletus edulis (as biologists like to call them) or porcini (as cooks like to call them) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boletus_edulis). Basically, these grow to the size of dinner plates (the biggest one I saw was at least ten inches in diameter, and about five inches high.

 My hand is for scale there. My hand span (from thumb to pinky) is about 8 inches.

This little guy was just poking up out of the moss, about 5cm in diameter. They are hard as golf balls when they poke up, and then get softer as they get less delicious. My trav partner today is a bit of a mushroom picker, and was pointing these out all day. Apparently they love spruce logs, and the half-sun half-shade mossy areas. He thinks they were out because we had a good rain yesterday and then it was warm and sunny today(23 degrees!). It was pretty sweet. It was a good exhausting traverse. The last hour was brutal, because we thought the brush would level out and get to somewhere below my waist, but it didn't. It just got boggy again until about 100m from our pickup spot. My knees are killing me, but it's a good hurt. At least that's what my post-trav beer is telling me.