Kurt (the original) and Tracy had decided to join us on this last hike before I had to go. Crisia almost didn’t come because she had hurt one of her knees, but in the end she sucked it up and joined us. This morning started early because it would take us a long time to get there. As we got closer to our destination, we drove sandwiched between Jack’s rental car and the van up a fairly narrow gravel road with logging trucks appearing out of nowhere to charge at us with just enough time for all three of our vehicles to pull over. They didn’t even slow down as they careened down the mountainside.
The top of this mountain was an alpine meadow, so there were lots of interesting plants for the class to check out. My favourite was the wild chive, which I pulled up occasionally to munch on as we walked on. Our walk up ended at a place Jack called the polygons. Here, the rocks appeared to be scattered almost honeycomb-like. After lunch, we wandered over to the edge of the meadow where supposedly on a clear day you could see to Saskatchewan. It was not a clear day. In fact, it appeared to be storming in certain places close by, and indeed, it started to thunder as we walked back to the vehicles.
Then, Jack led us to a place nearby where we could climb up and have a look inside a cave. It was a very steep, and I was surprised that Crisia, who was regretting coming along the fairly easy hike along the meadow, actually endeavoured to make her way up. As we were climbing up, it started to hail on us. This hail was the size of small marbles, and I don’t think I have seen anything like it prior to this. As they landed, they resembled small Styrofoam balls. At certain points, it came down really hard, and it actually hurt; I felt like I was being bombarded with a machine pellet gun on all sides.
We finally made our way up, and there was indeed a cave. The entire place reeked of wood rat, a scent which, by this time, we were very familiar with. Our local trailer wood rat was the size of a large squirrel and had made its presence known to us in this last week by running from our bathroom to our kitchen, while Nikhil, Tracy, and I were watching TV, and by trying to get into our cereal box on top of our microwave. Wood rats smell almost skunk-like, except not as strongly.
Nikhil had a personal vendetta against this particular wood rat and walked around with a walking stick we liked to call his beating stick. Our lab has ,in the past, done research on wood rats, so we did have some traps lying around. It took almost a week from when I left Kananaskis for Nikhil to finally catch this thing, but not before it found its way into Crisia’s unoccupied room and peed on all her stuff and chewed up the insoles of her shoes. It turns out that the trap that was used initially was faulty. Nikhil really wanted to kill it, but Crisia convinced him to let it go near one of our grids. When it was let go, it jumped into the undercarriage of the Ark. They were convinced that it tried to stow its way back, but they didn’t find it at the trailer again.
The way down was much more treacherous than the way up since the hail was all over the ground and made it slippery. I fell maybe three times. Of course, Kurt bounded all the way down very quickly and with no problems. At some point, I believe, Tracy fell. Nikhil made some sarcastic comment directed at her and then fell as well. Then Crisia said “Well, that’s not ironic at all.” In the middle of that sentence, she also fell, which resulted in laughter all around.
We finally managed to get all the way down, and then we followed Jack and his class to Longview, where we bought lots and lots of beef jerky, while it rained harder than we had seen it all summer. The class and our group then went our separate ways. We stayed in Longview and had some coffee, and then took the scenic route back to our grids that we had to set. By the time we got back, we were all thoroughly exhausted and starving, and half of us looked like drowned rats, or rather, drowned mice. My day was far from over at this point since I ended up spending all night packing for my return home.
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