Today was the most beautiful weather we've had in weeks up here. Blue sky in the morning, sunshine....Wow. I keep forgetting what summer is supposed to be like. It was a great day for a traverse.
We started off up on this knob in the forest, hiked down into a creek, hiked around in the creek searching for this limestone for a few hours, and then hiked back up the other side, and then hiked along a ridge until we got to the swamp for our pickup. The hiking-down part was pretty good; the bush wasn't thick, and we had some outcrop. The creek was pretty dense with brush. It had a pretty good flow to it, even pretty deep in some parts. We had a bit of trouble finding somewhere to cross, but we found a bit of a logjam to cross eventually. The creek was pretty cliffy on both sides, and we had to do a bit of depending on foliage to get around. We had to kinda Tarzan off of this cliffy part using a tree branch, but the branch was covered in dry pine needles, which mostly ended up in my hair and down my shirt. Pretty awesome. There was a ledge I had to inch over, grasping onto juniper branches (I was wearing gloves) to prevent myself from ending up in the creek. The edge of my boots barely fit on the ledge...It was a bit of a tight maneuver. We spent a few hours hanging out around the creek, searching for this limestone that was apparently there. I guess the team that mapped this area back in like the '80's did it all from a helicopter, and granted, these rocks certainly look like limestone. However, they just have a calcite cement on the surface, and when you whack them open with your hammer (or with your trav partner's sledge), you can clearly see that they are not limestone, but a flow-top-brecciated type of rock (lots of amygdoloidal basalt (with zeolites) and clast-y bits). So, we did make some changes to the map (which is what our main goal this summer is), but it was a bit of a pain to bum around in the creek all morning...especially this afternoon.
We had a late lunch by the creek, and then hiked up the ridge again. Unfortunately the bush was a lot thicker on this side of the creek. It was a bit brutal. My thighs and hips are killing me from having to kangaroo-step over all the bush all afternoon. We ended up taking a bit longer to get up the hill than expected, and it was a bit further than we thought to get to our pickup spot. We scaled the ridge by about 3:30pm, and then we had another 3km or so to get to the swamp/pickup spot. I have never bushwacked so fast in my life. It's too thick to run, but we definitely hoofed it. We knew it was going to be close, but we really had no other options. So we booked it. And still did geology. At 5pm, at the last geology stop, we had just over another kilometer to go to the swamp, with a half-hour till pickup. The bush for that last half hour was probably some of the worst bush I've been in up here, and that's saying something. The shrubs were about 8 feet high, and dense enough that I lost my trav partner a couple times (He's taller than me, has longer legs, and can walk over logs and shrubs that I have to yoga over). We did make it to the swamp with about 2 minutes to spare. I'm so tired now. I have to stretch out my legs tonight for sure, otherwise tomorrow morning will be brutal.
Speaking of brutal, our shower broke about 6 days ago, and it's not fixed yet. It's an electrical problem with the pump inside the on-demand-heater, so it's pretty much beyond repair, but I think we're getting another one sent up here, but that will take about a week or two. It's pretty isolated up here. A couple people have lucked out and had brief showers inside the house, but because the hot water tank is not working properly, we have to have super short showers, and only two people a day. I haven't showered in 6 days, and I don't even really mind anymore. I'm sure I smell bad, but I can't smell myself (like I could after fly camp) so I'm sure it's not that bad. That, and we're all in the same boat, alternating showers. Today was a rough day to have no shower, as I have a riduclous amount of nature in my hair. I'll have to shake myself off before I crawl into my sleeping bag tonight.
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