On the way out, we ran into a lady who asked us to take a first aid kit up to a guy who'd fallen down and hurt his knee. Ethan got to use his Outdoor Emergency Care skills to splint this guy's knee using his hiking poles. The guide wanted to carry the injured man out, but 911 sent a rescue helicopter to pick him up! Ethan and I had never gotten to see this in person, so we were pretty excited.
"I love the smell of Napalm in the morning!"
The Eagle has landed.After that bit of adventure, we hiked on to the lakes. There is a really neat pair of waterfalls between the upper and lower lakes. We also saw a large hoary marmot that the previous group had mistaken for a wolverine. Unfortunately, my pictures of him are unimpressive.
Ethan in front of the waterfalls.
The lower falls up close.
The upper falls up close.The next morning we decided to get up and hike to Bomber Glacier, via Bomber Pass. On this glacier lies an old B-29 bomber that crashed in the late 50s. 6 of the 10 men died in the crash, but the other 4 were rescued. Here's Bomber Pass: does it look scary?
Well, it was! It was outrageously steep for me, with a lot of scree. Plus, everything was kind of wet, which made it slippery. I'm pretty much a weenie when it comes to this stuff though. If it hadn't been for Ethan encouraging me, I never would have made it up to see the bomber.
This is our route: the red is the route up, the blue is the route down. (Click for better resolution).
Here's the bomber from the top of the pass! It looked like a bunch of rocks to me at first. Of course, it's half covered now because it has been snowing on it for 50 years.
We made it down with no issues and back to camp.
Our "eating rock". Bomber Pass is the one in the background.
View from the rock. You can see our tent all the way on the right.Later we took a short hike to another small lake. A pond, really.
Finally the clouds moved in and it rained overnight.
On the way home, we found another big waterfall to eat lunch by. Ethan is trying to give a sense of scale; the waterfall was probably 30 ft high.
Overall, it was a great trip and it didn't rain too much. We didn't see any bears (yay!), the marmots didn't eat our food (yay!) and no one got hurt (doubly yay!). I was disappointed that my pictures of the marmots and the ptarmigan I saw at the top of the pass didn't really turn out, but that's okay. We'll always have our memories!
2 comments:
You didn't mention it, but if you look closely at the first picture, you can actually see a patch of real-life SUNLIGHT on the mountains in the background...and the only sun we saw during the trip was during the hike into the valley.
That sounds like an exciting hike! It's cool that you guys were able to help the injured hiker (and even cooler that you got to watch a helicopter rescue).
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