Viking Ridge - the real post

This is one of the most dauntingly beautiful hikes within an hour or so of the PG territory. Rugged and placid moments throughout the trail evening out the experience and plummeting my worries away for the day. I was in another world, and as much as that cliche ravages my eyes to see typed, it is, was, reality.

I traveled on foot from misty fog and warm shrubery to frozen snow covered mountaintop wetland. It was wonderful, and trying.
Ghastly moments alone in the woods, 2 hours up a mountainside, just passed bear scat, not a sound to comfort or obstruct my thoughts - and then WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP!....gluk...gluk..gluk.... right beside me. RIGHT beside me.....no room for personal space...they wait until you are 'on them' and then they go to their "whump Whump" wing flapping absurditiy of a defense mechanism.

Gets me everytime. Every time.

The beginning of the hike in interior temperate rainforest - massive pillars of aged trees abound. A veritable cloaking of green moss giving the forest the charm of life countering the stark upward phallic of trees; a cozy moment. Warm, rainy and damp at this point.

And then I snuck in my first snow chew of the year. As I worked my way up slope the meagre warmth of the lowland area left, and I felt the chill of altitude nip at my exposed face. The snow was sparse at this point but enough to elicit the glee of incumbent winter and the worries of a summer gone. The trail was much active still with no frozen sections to help my fleet footing - cold mud for the most part!

And then....the Caribou Flats of the ridge line. Atop the peak of this ridge, after hours of hiking upwards through the massive cedars and hemlocks, the green mossy floor, the running streams and nattering songbirds, the forest opened up and gave a fiesta of emotion. The snow was now ankle deep at times, enough to hide the near liquid sediment ground that allowed me to, early on, amass much mud on my boots and have it duly frozen in place! When my feet were not falling through marshy vegetation and slopping about in the watery highlands, they were feeling their way across some of the most beautiful ecology that I have found so close to home. The alpine was ahead, unattained for this trip, but after my glimpse of what was here the return is unavoidable.

I kept on through this section for a 1/2 hour or so, took lunch and bundled up to head back down. After some brief re-con with a map at home I realized that this trail actually connects to two others, and a fabulous overnight trip is available, necessary even.

The land will be wet all year long, not just a seasonal trait, up this high and with such rock below and I am wondering about the 'skitters and flies. Time will tell......

The view on the way down through the foggy conifers. Mystical, in its most non-mystical meandered meaning.

g'night.