Day Seven: Walk Out
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It's an early morning, and thick clouds and fog blanket the area. Blech!
Weather has an incredibly strong effect on motivation and emotions when
you're living outdoors - when it's bright and sunny energy and enthusiasm
just soar, and when it cloudy, raining or cold all you want to do is sleep.
But today we have to get up early and get moving - we have a long way
to go.
The walk out starts by traversing across a slope, which is a major pain
because the snow is soft and slippery, one leg ends up doing most of the
work, and the packs are STILL heavy.
You'd think that after eating like pigs for the last two days those
darn packs would weigh less, right?
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| It's foggy and disgusting outside - do we have to get up already?
Sleepy heads: Jocelyn and Normand |
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| Starting up the slope toward the high pass below Mt. Norton. |
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After the traverse comes a slog up to a high pass just west of the ridge of Mt.
Norton, which will let us drop down a gently sloping glacier and out onto
morraine and scree. As we drop down the glacier we are all wishing for skis
- walking down this gentle slope is ok, but skiing down would be so much better!
Once off the glacier below Mt. Norton, we descend glacier-worn limestone
to the toe of the Tsar glacier, where it drops into a large bowl of steep
cliffs covered in waterfalls. The river flowing out the bottom of it immediately
flows into a canyon - this is half of the headwaters of the Sullivan River,
the other half coming from the Wales glacier, 9km to the east.
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| Glacial lake at the toe of the Tsar glacier. |
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Most of us get past the canyon, lake and river obstacles by moving up
on to the glacier. Alex, apparantly feeling the need to immerse his feet
in a glacial river, decides to take off his boots and walk across the
braided channels where the lake drains into the river. Got any feeling
in your toes yet, Alex?
We've left the glacier for good now, and the last 5-6km involve hiking
and scrambling across scree and then some hidious bushwacking through
avalanche slope growth and logging clearcuts back to the car. The scree
goes by quickly, and is actually quite beautiful - there are alternating
layers of black and orange limestone in this area, and the resulting rubble
is a colorful melange of the two, plus occasional greens and browns.
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| We start to see life once again, on the water-worn limestone just below
the glacier. |
Black and orange beds of limestone form colorful fields of rubble that
we cross below Tsar Mtn. |
And then we enter the forest, and the fun really begins.
You really haven't lived until you've had to thrash your way through chest-high
bush, over lumpy ground covered in logs, climbing a steep, slippery slope, with
a heavy pack on, during a rainstorm. It really doesn't get better than this!
The joy continues unabated until we enter the final clearcut, and we can follow
a logging road down to the car. It has taken us almost two hours to cover two kilometers.
The sight of Jocelyn's Subaru brings whoops of joy, and we dump the packs, change
into fresh clothes, and start the four-hour drive back to Golden. The promise
of pizza and beer has kept us going for the last few hours, and now it's about
to become reality!
Arriving in Golden close to midnight, we search for a motel, finally finding
one with a room available. This incredible trip is officially over when the
pizza guy arrives and we dive into food that's hot, greasy and wasn't boiled
in a pot!
Darren Foltinek, August 14, 2002.
©2002 Front Range Publishing