We didn’t make the summit. We got a late start — I’d forgotten about a ten-o’clock appointment — and our climb, five miles of it and change, was enveloped by a cold drizzle. As we gained altitude the wind gained speed. I was comfortable, if not exactly dry, in a few layers of pile Becky bought for me. Matthew was less-well-dressed. What’s more, I have an extra layer of body fat, and the only way skinny Matthew could have taken advantage of a layer of fat would have been to slit me open and crawl inside. As his hands were too cold to peel the blood oranges I brought along, this was pretty much out of the question. So we went back down after eating lunch at the Juniper Campground, and we only hiked five miles uphill in the rain instead of the seven. Round trip 10.3 miles, ish, and total climb 2906 feet, 320 of that in small rises on the way back down. Year to date: 94.8 miles, 18,634 feet. With our half-hour lunch break included, the hike took us five hours.
I took no camera. I thought we might try for the summit despite the cold and rain, and was reluctant to expose the camera to that much water. Pity. The way was lined with dodecatheon, with white-flowering native Clematis, with coffee fern and yellow wallflower and forgets-me-not. Miners’ lettuce cloaked the disarticulated skeleton of a deer, stripped clean. The long slow climb out the head of the canyon we were wreathed in mist, and the slopes of Eagle Peak, which Becky and I climbed a while ago, might have inspired a Tang Dynasty landscape artist to throw away his palette in despair at ever capturing the soft gray fingers rifling contorted pines on near-vertical slopes. A half dozen ephemeral waterfalls leapt, glissaded five hundred feet down Eagle Peak’s west face, bands of pale rushing white, their music drowned by the roar of Mitchell Creek.
