While I was rolling the sleeping bags, I saw two people cresting the
mountain. The breathless young woman mentioned last night’s storm. I
said the storm was exciting, but at 58, I’d found the climb exhausting.
She laughed, said she was 37 and hadn’t thought she would make it, said
she couldn’t imagine her mother even attempting the climb.
We’d
left Vancouver for the three-hour drive to Long Peak. Travelling the
narrow coastal highway I felt nervous seeing signs warning of falling
rocks from the steel-netted cliff face.
On the winding,
narrow logging road I worried about squeezing past hell-bent logging
trucks. When we finally parked the car dusk was falling in the shadow
of the mountain. We camped on the shale beach beside the lake, cooked
dinner, admired the clear night sky, and went to bed.
Early
next morning we began the drive to the trailhead. The car struggled up
the steep rock-strewn road and we soon realized we weren’t about to get
much closer. We shouldered our backpacks and began the hike to the
forest. Either side of the road grew pearl everlasting and other floral
offerings in abundance, and we continually heard the sharp squeaks of
pica darting for cover.
At the trailhead the pitch was
considerably intensified as we climbed the steep path. At times the
scree was so loose, the path so narrow I experienced vertigo observing
the valley below. Our son, a biologist, was in his element; my husband
was in no distress. Their backpacks were far weightier than mine, but
my legs were turning to stone, and my lungs felt like bursting.
Our
son had been there before and said we’d soon be reaching the Gates of
Shangri-La, a widespread rockfall over which we clambered. The rocks
were huge, the area wide, and it took quite a bit of effort to find our
way through it. The views, too, were spectacular, looking across from
where we slowly wound our way through rocks each as large as a car, a
small shed.
Another milestone; a mountain hut and
around it, a vertical green meadow dissected by a narrow trail. We
peered into the hut and stepped inside. A big old stove, a long table,
some chairs, and upstairs a sleeping loft. There was a visitor's book,
signed by people who obviously slept over, intent on a longer hike than
ours, presumably. A number of the messages noted the appearance of
packrats, swifting away with anything not nailed down. Not far from the
hut stood a reliable and stout out-house, of which several of our party
made use.
“Not long now, Mom!” shouted our son
encouragingly. As I struggled up and upward following a well-worn, but
quite narrow pathway up the green meadow. Finally, it appeared that he
was right; we were approaching what appeared to be another landscape
entirely.
A marmot greeted us as we forded a stream
shooting over the mountain from a blue-green glacial lake. Above the
lake, after our 8-hour climb, we pitched our tent. On a bit of a shelf
in the rock. A 'bit of a shelf' is the operative word here. The floor
of the tent slanted downward slightly, toward to the lake. At the far
end of the lake was the dominating presence of the glacier that fed it,
roaring as it melted, for this was late August.
On
day-trips ascending from our camp we discovered other, smaller glacial
lakes and glaciers, some blooming with red algae. We crossed other
rockfalls and accessed crests where we ate lunch and gazed over unending
peaks across the Stein Valley.
On one of these
excursions clear skies turned suddenly dark; a thunderhead began its
journey toward us. We scrambled to descend. Thunder, lightening, great
gusts of wind, sleet and rain pummelled our little tent, with us
huddling inside, as the temperature plummeted, but it stood fast.
When
the storm finally subsided, we began to think about something
approximating an evening meal. Everything around us was completely
drenched. And it was, by then, quite dark. Suddenly, we saw what
looked like a flare across the valley, on another mountain top, opposite
to where we sat. And as the flare grew, and we understood it to be
someone's camp fire, we set up a loud cheer. Obviously heard on the
other side, since we heard a faint response of a cheer from them.
(Made
me wonder if in their distant proximity, I was as private as I thought
myself to be, squatting over a fissure in the rockface, half-hidden
behind a knobbly shrub.)
We slept soundly that night,
though waking occasionally. I kept thinking we were going to roll off
the side of the mountain. In fact, I shifted myself sometimes, with the
feeling that the slant was compelling me in a direction I had no wish
to go in. And when we awoke, it was to the rushing sound of the melting
glacier, at the end of that fabulous blue-green lake below us.
The
clear skies of the day before, that had made yesterday such an
adventure, had given way, when we awoke, to a completely overcast,
bruised sky, threatening to dump once again. We made another morning
excursion after a good hefty breakfast of pancakes and tea, and
mandarine oranges, scrambling over the rockface to find yet another
rosy-crusted glacier. Returning to our camp site, with the threat of
rain undiminished, we decided to break camp and descend.
As
we descended the valley I felt good and brave and happy post-adventure,
yet anxious anticipating the car-sized rocks at Shangri-La, the steep,
narrow defile through the forest. The extent of my surprise (and
deflation) cannot possibly be imagined as, halfway through Shangri-la we
passed a young man with a paniered Labrador, then a family with two
young children making their way up the mountain, happy in their
enterprise.
How Canadian can you get?
