@ Pondero: Andy's got the spirit of the seemingly self effacing "wimp". In the face of these mountains, which can throw extremes and multiple unexpecteds at any time, everyone is wimpy, puny, insignificant. The rock and the wind and the wet rein at will. The wise know this and learn to dance with the mountains rather than conquer them. Growing up here, I read countless accounts of "experts" at mountaineering, back county skiing, hiking, etc., whose friends posthumously praised their outdoor skills, and yet they were buried because of hubris.
@ Andy: Och! Aye. The San Juans are amazing, brutal mountains. The first backpack trip my wife and I took together was 10 years after your adventure. The plan was Ouray to Silverton. The best maps were GSPS surveys from the '50's. Locals in Ouray said the trail was good, but they'd never taken it more than a day hike (that was our first clue). The morning of day two the trail vanished. Poof. absorbed by the still lush September fields of hard fought Summer's tundra growth (it takes a looooong time for trails to disappear at altitude). I triangulated our position and we continued on. Jeep trails not going anywhere we cared to were abundant, we got caught on a 13,000 foot saddle with zero count lightening and inch sized hail from which my pack descended 2000 feet under it's own power only denting our fuel bottle, and were utterly baffled as to where we were when a valley that ought to have held a lake did not. We worked our way out to the paved highway, hitched back to our car, and drove to Silverton. We learned the lake had been mined under a decade before and that because of high four-wheeling traffic, hikers no longer used those trails. With abandon, Patrick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
