Glory Trav!

Today was such a beautiful day. The photo is looking south over (Lower) Gnat Lake. If you look closely, you can see a white truck parked on the highway just on the west side of the lake. That was where we parked today, around 1200m. We finally got over that doggone creek today, and then hiked up to our intended traverse yesterday, thanks to the ingenuity of Canada's finest animal: The Noble Beaver. We scouted out some beaver dams, and then walked across the bogged up area, waded across the shallow parts of the creek (by shallow, I mean that this was a half-nude traverse again, I was up to my mid-upper thighs in ice-cold water) and then hiked up to 1500m. It was awesome. We found some excellent exposures of alternating laminated sandstones (beautiful bedding) and augite- & plagioclase-pheric flows or sills (some plag- glomeroporph too, beautiful flower shapes). It was interesting for sure. I have tons of photos, but the satellite internet takes at least 5 or 10 minutes to upload a photo, so I don't think that's going to happen too often.  The hike down was a bit brutal, but we found a lovely cut-trail thanks to some surveyors from at least last year. Beautiful straight line trail all the way back down to the road that we tried to ford the creek in yesterday. Unfortunately that was about 2 km through boggy ground from where we parked today. The last two kilometers were definitely the most painful. We had to hike past the truck, around the boggy beaver swamp, through the boggy beaver swamp, find our boot-tree (my trav partner wore gumboots through the creek, even though the creek was much higher than his boots), and then undress, ford the creeks, re-dress, and then walk back to the truck along the highway. This whole ordeal ended up taking at least an hour in the morning (mostly because we vaguely saw some beaver dams on Google Maps, and then had to actually find them) and about half an hour or so in the evening (thanks to being exhausted after bushwacking all day). It had just started to hail when we got back to the truck. 

So not only did we have beautiful weather all day, beautiful exposures, a lovely (gruelling) hike, the rest of the crew had the shower hooked up, so I am clean, bathed, fed, and warm (we finally got the fireplace in the shed set up). Sigh, life is good. My knee is not as bad as it was; it's still kind of angry about going downhill, but if I lead with my left leg, then my right leg gets a bit of a break. I was just about going to bail on trav today, but I thought I'd see how it went. Glad I stuck it out! 

Oh, and no helicopter today (obviously). Maybe tomorrow. Hopefully. Fingers crossed!