Finally July!

I know I keep saying that tomorrow we head out on the chopper,but that's actually happening this time. Finally!! We've pretty much done all the traverses we can do by the Telegraph Creek Road, so it's off to the distant hills now. And by distant, I mean just on the other side of the hill. Too far to walk in one day, but not too far away not to walk home if bad weather happened. It would be brutal. The terrain here isn't so bad, but the brush is just ridiculous. The ground is either soft with moss or just soft in general (swampy even), and then there's shrubs about 5 feet tall at LEAST, so when your trav partner gets more than 15 feet in front of you, you can't see him/her anymore. The brush is so thick that you have to step on the shrubbery branches in order to pass through them, so you're kind of hop-stepping all day long. No wonder my knee is messed up. My knee is getting better though, which is good. Totally hurt after today, but only at the end of the traverse, when we were on hands & knees climbing out of this creek bed. The weather was ridiculous today. Not bad, but just annoying. It was beautiful out in the morning, not a cloud in the sky, and then BAM thunder started rolling in from the west, followed by showers of rain and hail, alternating with sunshine all day. We did get some good outcrops though. We found a bunch of stuff that wasn't on the previous map (the one we're improving through additional details this summer) so that counts at least. It was all marked as 'Quaternary deposit' which basically means it's covered in gravel, usually a glacial till type of deposit out here. We saw limestone, greenschist, altered granite, sand- & siltstone.... within two kilometers of the road. So, already we've improved the map.

Everything else here is going well. The food is good, showers are happening on a near-regular schedule, we have fires in the tent, washing machine in the shed, beer in the cooler... Well I have beer still. When my delicious micro-brew runs out, I will have to resort to Canadian, Budweiser, Kokanee, or Stella. Or hard liquor. Those are basically the options at the local BCL/Super a/Petro Can/Restaurant/Laundromat/Post Office. I wish I was making this up, but they all operate out of the same premises. The restaurant is alright, the Super a is the grocery store, which is also decent. No hardware store in town, which means a LOT of jerry-rigging (apologies to any Jerrys out there). Not sure how the laundry  is going to work out, but at least we have access to a machine now, instead of washing our clothes by hand in buckets with bars of soap. Not that I minded the "Little House on the Prairie" type experience, but it's just time-consuming after hiking all day. And now with the heat in the tents, it takes less than 3 days to dry a pair of socks. I wish I had more pairs of socks though. I could always order more online from MEC, and they'd get mailed up here.

Alrighty, it's bed time for me. Gonna go stoke the fire (if it's out, I'm just going to pretend I didn't see that, and snuggle down into my sleeping bag to stay warm) and read some Harry Potter.