When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Snow Peak in the middle from Aug 2nd

Today: simultaneously the coldest and hottest day we've had up here.

No joke. I woke up and it was cold in the tent, and there was frost on the ground. My watch stopped in the middle of the night (well, 4:30am) because it was so cold. It was pretty difficult to get out of my bag today.

We ended up having a bit of a roundabout morning. We were supposed to head out on a truck traverse to Hloey Lakes Road, where there's a hydroelectric facility, and had someone to come unlock the gates for us this morning. Apparently they forgot or something, because we waited for about half an hour and they didn't show up. We ended up calling the chopper pilot, and then racing back to camp to head out on traverse. As such, we didn't get out until about 10:15 or so, about two hours later than usual. We bumped back our pickup time to 7pm, so we would have enough time to do our traverse. It's a bit rough being out that late, being that we got up around 6:45. I find that I get into a groove where I pace myself(and my snacks) so that by about 5pm or so I'm about done. But not today.

The traverse was good though, oh boy. Every outcrop we stopped at was a different rock. By 3 hours in to our hike, we had 4 or 5 different rock types. We had amygdoloidal basalt, a gabbroic intrusion, dolomite, fusulinid-limestone, limestone (with recrystalized crinoids), laminated blue (and green) siltstone, chert, chert and limestone (interbedded), and some maroon and green volcaniclastic rocks. It was epic. We don't usually get this much variety, let alone all in one day. The fusulinids were neat. I hadn't heard of them before, but basically they're these little rice-grain shaped marine organisms that tend to get preserved in limestone (from here).  We started up in a swamp, and hiked down into a creek, and then along the creek, and then up the other side to another swamp. We're kind of like moose, we spend a lot of time in swamps. The creek wasn't even that bad. It was cliffy, and we got stuck ('cliffed out') a few times, but we worked our way around it, and climbed up and out, and then went back down.

It was so exciting though. We saw this EPIC fold, and I've never seen such a big fold in real life before (I've seen photos in textbooks, but not in person, so close!). It was so exciting. The photo is looking north-west from the cliff on the other side of the creek. We couldn't get down and up the other side easily, so we couldn't go get measurements off of it directly, but we did get some measurements from further up the creek.

By the afternoon, it was so hot out today, I nearly threw myself in the creek. I am not really a fan of hot weather, especially when I'm exerting myself, so when it hit about 20 degrees today, it was ridiculous. I wet down my headband twice in the creek, soaked my hair, and refilled my waterbottle. The creeks up here have the best water I have ever drank in my life, just so fresh and cold. Delicious.

We got to our pickup spot around 6:30pm, which was nice. Often we end up running for the swamp at the end of the day, and that's just stressful. We didn't really pick a decent landing spot when our pilot showed up 10 minutes early, and we were in kind of an uneven spot, so we did a proper hover-entry, which was neat. One skid was on the ground, one was in the air.

EDIT: The stupid fusulinid photo wouldn't upload fast enough and I'm exhausted. Tomorrow will be fusulinids.  I promise.