Mt. Cheam

This was a super good hike. If you go straight up the face of the mountain it's an 11 hour round trip, but if you're slightly out of shape for that kind of thing (or just lazy) there's an old logging road that goes half way up, and around back where it only takes about 3 hours to reach the summit. we took the lazy road.

Once you get on the logging road it's a ghetto 30 minute drive full of potholes and trees and other obstructions. My friend and I road in the back of the pickup while his dad drove.....it was pretty crazy. But after a while you start to rise above the level of the trees, and when you reach the parking lot and take a fairly short walk you end up in a beautiful alpine meadow. It looks like something straight out of pictures of the Alps. Wildflowers and bees and a little clear blue lake in the middle. Gorgeous. That's not the kind of wilderness we're used to seeing in Vancouver because you have to go pretty high up to get out of the rainforest, so it was a new experience for me, and I was completely digging it.

Skip ahead about an hour, and we've climbed high above the meadow, and you can see the little lake down a few hundred feet below. I'm huffing and puffing and about to die, but I have hope because from the angle we were at it looked like the peak wasn't that far off-I was wrong. It wasn't the peak at all, but rather it was beautiful alpine meadow #2. Not quite as nice as #1 because as one goes higher there are less flowers, and there was no lake, but there was a little bit of snow which was a nice treat. When we got up there, instead of heading straight across and back onto the upward trail we walked to the edge of a cliff that went down the side of the mountain and looked across to this other mountain that was right next to the one we were on, and just as we looked a big cloud blew across the spot we were standing and it was the eeriest thing i've seen in a while. It basically just blocked out the light and heat, and it was like we were in a totally different place.

Later we got going again and finally reached the summit. The view wasn't as good as it could have been because we were above the clouds, and they rolled down below blocking the sights. But it was still amazing, standing up there thousands of feet above the valley floor.

And josh has the camera in DC. so no pictures. it was painful to be seeing it all, and not having a camera. I would stop every few minutes and be thinking "right there in front of me is the greatest picture I've ever seen" but I had no camera.

but anyways......
it was good fun;.
out.