Summer is over and fall is here. Fall up in the mountains tend to be a bit more winter-like then most other fall places. Wind storms and light snow flurries makes the days exciting. Of course all this good fun and excitement is only nice if you can stay warm. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't able to stay warm.
The problem started on my last backpacking trip when I hiked from Mammoth Lakes over to Yomsemite. The hike was beautiful, it was just Ashlee and I out for a nice four day jaunt. I tend to keep a pretty healthy pace when I hike, but Ashlee has no problem keeping up. One the third day of our hike, we decided to hike only few miles and have a nice relaxing day.
Poor Ashlee didn't realize that on this particular rest day that we would actually be working harder then if we were hiking. My forever working brain decided to create a huge spiral in this dry lake bed up around 11,000 feet. Hours and hours and hours were spent lifting heavy rocks, moving huge boulders and creating art. After a day and a half of this nonsense and we're done and we head down to Yosemite just in time for the end of the year International Dinner extravaganza.
"Excuse me Kevin.... what does this have to do with fall being cold?"
Well, during the exhaustive work on that spiral, I happened to remove my coat to get a little cooler. I placed it down and continued to work. When I got up the next morning and finished the project, I totally forgot about my coat. You see, it was warm during the day and the thought didn't even cross my mind. That's the disadvantage to living in the moment all the time - a serious lack of prethought and foresight.
So now I'm up in the aspen groves painting leaves and freezing my bum off without a coat. I figure it's time to return to the high country and retreive that which is rightfully mine. I'm fortunate enough to recruit a friend for this exhausting hike. The closest way to get to the spiral is to hike up a few thousand feet, over the Kuna Cresrt, down a thousand feet and over this plateau to the art site. It's probably a twenty plus mile hike, but with the elevation gain and loss it seemed twice as long.
We arrived at the site, retreived my coat which was just sitting right where I left, and headed back down to arrive at the car just before headlamp time. Which was quite fortunate since I didn't bring a headlamp along in the first place.
