That's the PR anyway ("hikers' paradise"). I've been sampling the YouTube genre of "hikes gone wrong", a lore passed along by hikers themselves as a set of cautionary tales. Sometimes they're just reminders: you can do everything right and still lose out. Taking along a device with the new "rescue me" button, which sends an sos signal over cell, is often recommended, but even one of those won't save the day in all circumstances. I think we all know this, but the details still matter.
From such cautionary tales, I'm able to feel reminded of life's lessons, which merit going over, even if one is not doing any neck-risking mountain climbing or even skiing. My Seattleite side of the family has the skiers, both on water and on snow. I managed to get somewhere with downhill skiing but haven't tried it since the 1980s after a successful run in New Jersey (I forget which mountain, maybe Eddie knows). That was back when I was a math and history teacher for a small elite academy for young ladies, and in my 20s.
One of the best hiking trips I did was backpacking into Lake Bertha with Tom Connolly. We elected to forge ahead even though hikers coming the other way said the weather was against us. What's a little rain storm? This sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale, but we made it fine, if drenched.
My main memory of that sojourn was the little deer eating my T-shirt off the line, like a goat might do. Damn. But it let me walk right up to it (no fear) and yank the T-shirt back out, as a little bit of it was dangling out of its mouth. I hung it up to dry without rinsing it and it turned stiff as a board thanks to deer saliva.
Lake Bertha is in Glacier Park and this was part of a longer trip involving Gutless, my Honda Civic, and our road trip to Montana. The late Tom Connally and his family (whom I'm still in touch with) hailed from Missoula. He wanted to show me his roots. We had a blast.
