PART THREE
It was not long after the Bristlecone Pine trail turnoff (which has been explored before on this site, click here to go there) that I came to a decision point: the broad trail turned into a narrow trail and no one had been on it yet: here it is in the middle of the next photo -- untouched by snowshoe hikers or cross-country skiers:
With just normal hiking boots on I was not ready to blaze the first footsteps on this narrower trail that has some sharp turns and very steep segments (making it a favorite for adventurous mountain bikers like my son, who has done this trail about a dozen times while I hiked it, carefully). So I checked the elevation and saw I had come a thousand feet up:
A thousand feet was good enough for me, so I decided to start back down after taking a look around
On the way back I got to see more vistas of note:
And those few little fleeting holes in the clouds allowed me to play cat-and- mouse with the sun:
To my surprise, one of these holes allowed a brief moment of sunlight on the mountain to my left, as I descended:
I was glad because this caused me to keep looking up and to the left. Why? Because somehow, on the way up, I had missed this almost surreal looking beauty:
It doesn't get much better than this, I thought. As soon as had this thought the clouds closed up again. Soon I was back at the turn to the right, clouds were getting lower, and it began to flurry:
I took plenty of photos on the way down but they repeated what I had taken on the way up, just with more cloud and snow flurries. Here is another view of the ski resort, with clouds almost at the top of the run:
By the time I returned to the car my feet hurt. So I was happy to get back in the beast, and start for home:
But I was very pleasantly surprised by the views that met me coming down the road from the canyon (see Page Four).
Go to ThoughtsandPlaces.Org Home Page
