Travels with Walter: Doin' Stuff

A little slow on the posting again...seems to happen a lot these days. Part of it has been a lack of time to sit down for a few minutes and part has been from the annual mid-winter malaise. I have started thinking about summer trips already. Usually I don't fantasize about long hot days until late March or April, but I guess it has started early this year because we have had an intense winter (still over a foot of snow in my yard). And it has been a bad winter for illness. Since my last post, I developed a MAJOR sinus infection that made me want to fling myself off a cliff. I have a sneaking suspicion that the lap pool at the YMCA may be partly to blame. I know it is to blame for the all over body rash I had last week after spending an hour in the water. I now have a three week moratorium on chlorine so I can let my skin heal.

At any rate, since my last post Walter and I did a winter hike to the top of Mt. Spokane and Nancy and I took a day trip up north to check out a horse hoarder (the crazy bitch has 54 horses...at least they were all healthy and well fed but she was running out of hay) and look at the scenery around the Pend Orielle River.

The trip up to the top of Mt. Spokane was the first winter one I have taken that did not involve the ski lift. We started at the snowmobile trailhead which is at 4525 feet above sea level. The top of Mt. Spokane is 5889 so we had an elevation gain of 1364 feet. We took a sort of weird way up. Part was on the main snowmobile trail, part on the groomed alpine runs, part on snowshoe routes and part just straight up the hill. The fun part was watching the big towers on top get closer and closer. And again, the valleys were socked in with fog so we were above the clouds. The scariest part was coming straight down the hill on the snowmobile corridor to the summit road. That was a serious slope. Going up we took a round about way that had more switchbacks so I could arrive alive on top of the mountain without lung tissue stuck to the front of my jacket. On the way down the corridor I met a woman coming up who was not wearing snowshoes or crampons and she was not sure how she was going to get down, but the fool kept heading up the hill. I was tempted to slide down on my butt...however, I value an intact spinal column. So here are pictures of the day on the hill.