[Elspode]

We were loathe to get out of our tents, because the blood sucking bastards had already started swarming, crawling all over the nylon, but there was little to be done about it. We broke camp, and headed on up the mountain.

Although we had done some conditioning hikes in preparation for this rather ambitious undertaking (I was carrying 60# on my back), the increasing elevation began to take its toll. As the air thinned out, so did the trees. Fortunately, so did the bugs. There was some compensation, though...as the large open areas increased, and the trees decreased, there were vast meadows of wildflowers in riotous bloom. Everywhere you looked, a sea of red, blue, purple, white; spread out in a vista the like of which I have never seen again.

Our goal was only at 8,500 feet elevation, but for a flatlander, that was up where it began to get hard to breathe. The last bit of the hike, up and over the edge of the bowl wherein lay the lake, rose by 800 feet in elevation over a mere 600 feet of forward travel...greater than a 50% grade. It also happened that, as the trek grew more arduous, our water consumption increased, until we were completely out of water with a half mile to go...and the stream along whose valley we had been hiking was by now over 200 feet below the trail, and utterly inaccessible.

Fortunately, my better-conditioned best friend Dan had enough gumption to hurry on ahead, up to the where the remnants of glacier lay, and scoop up enough snow to fill our nearly empty water bottles. I've never had a better drink of water, either before that moment, or since then.

We finally strode up and over the lip, only to turn around and look back from whence we'd come. I have to tell you here and now that I've never been more proud of anything I've ever done. It almost looked like a straight wall we'd come up from the vantage point of the bowl's edge. We could clearly see the glacial plain on whose edge we'd spent the previous night, and it seemed ridiculously tiny and far away.

We were exhausted, but we set up a sturdy campsite, and gathered wood. In the process of attempting to break a large branch off of a fallen pine, weathered white from its exposure on the nearly naked ridge, I leaned, pulled and grunted with all my might, until the brach suddenly snapped clean off, and I fell backward with my full weight. My left arm scraped against a branch stub on the huge log, and ripped a substantial amount of flesh from my forearm. Another two inches to my left, and I would have been wholly impaled on the stub, which was very pointy and threatening.

First aid and whiskey (which tasted like soap...never wash out your plastic hiking bottles with soapy water) fixed me up pretty well, and we spent a really fine evening around a crackling fire, turning in relatively early due to exhaustion. The next morning, my other two male companions decided to scale Leggit Peak, the summit of which was another 900 feet above where we were camped. My legs were like rubber, so I bid them farewell and hunted up more firewood. After a period of time, I heard a faint sound in the near silence, and turned to look up at the top of the peak. I saw them, jumping and waving, small as fleas on a dog, but definitely there. Crazy bastards.

That night, we prepared to feast, and to party, because in the morning, we would be heading back down the mountain and out of the wilderness. I had gathered an enormous quantity of wood (no mean feat as we were right at treeline there, and it was none too plentiful), and we looked forward to a huge, warm fire that night.

The night before had been moonless, and perfectly clear...the blackest sky I have ever seen, and the brightest stars. As it happened, I discovered that you could, in fact, cast a shadow by starlight, something which I had never even considered might be possible before that. This night, though, had been growing ominously cloudy even as the sun was setting, and by nightfall, nary a star was to be seen. Even worse was the fact that the wind was slowly rising, and rumbles of thunder could be heard in the distance.

A storm doesn't sound the same when you're in the mountains. The booms reflect off of countless hard stone surfaces, causing one clap of thunder to sound like dozens - even hundreds - of percussions as each echo reaches your ears at slightly different times. It was intimidating, but exhilirating. We had already lit the fire, and were busily feeding it all the wood we had, but the wind kept rising, so we quickly made even more secure our already well-pitched tents, adding tarps and weighting the bottoms with stone embankments in the direction of the wind.

Spatters of rain began to fall, drops seemingly the size of tennis balls, and we quickly retreated to our shelters. The wind was now a full gale, something on the order of 35-40 mph, I'd guess. The firepit glowed white hot...not yellow, not red, but pure glaring white. A plume of sparks blew fully 35 feet up the stone hillside, making our fire look something like an earthbound comet. The wood was completely exhausted within 15 minutes, and the blaze sputtered out in the now driving rain.

Somehow, through all of this, our tent was staying utterly, completely dry. However, my friend Dan's tent was more of a culvert than a shelter by now, and he grabbed his sleeping bag and dived in with us to ride out the maelstrom. The storm had now come directly upon us, and the lightning and thunder became nearly constant. We could hear lighting strike so near to us that we would then hear rocks skittering down the slope immediately afterward. The ground literally shook beneath us. We were *in* the storm, not under it, and it was frightening beyond my ability to express.

It didn't help things one bit that we shouted to the other couple in the next tent, asking them if they remembered the last admonition of the miner back at our first camp site. I don't know how we managed to sleep, but we did indeed drift off, wondering if we would survive the night.

(Later...the end of the adventure)