I actually was able to take a standard, corporate-approved holiday yesterday (well, I was on call in the evening, but that's the way that goes). Nola started in early asking did I want to go here, or there, or the other place, and I stared at my coffee and mumbled. Finally she said she'd just make a decision, thank dog, and pretty soon I found my slacker self dressed and my boots on my feet and my pack on my back, following her into the wilds of the Golden Ears provincial park.
The plan, I learned after my brain caught up to my body, waving around a pocket watch and shrieking, "I'm late!" at regular intervals, was to follow the trail along Gold Creek until it reached the falls.
"Any bears around here?"
"Might be!"
She was entirely too cheerful, so I figured it was really too early for bears to be down from their dens yet.
Many of the trees were covered in long, thick, hairy moss, including their limbs. When the sun got behind them, they looked like tattered wings. Aside from a couple of bumblebees and a butterfly, we saw no woodland creatures in the park, though on the way home a fat deer strolled from the road into someone's yard. Mostly we just walked along, listening to the splashing of small creeklets tumbling down to the larger one, and looked inside hollow trees, and brushed cobwebs out of each other's hair afterward, and it got noisier and noisier and we were at the falls.
They're not a classic kind of falling from a great height falls, but more of the cascade kind—if they were less vigourous, they'd be rapids. As it is, they're what's euphemistically called "unnavigable" and really means, "death in three to eight seconds."
Even so, there were silly people who had breached the protective fencing and gone past the hazard signs to clamber around on the rock of the shores, and even onto rocks out in the middle, which upset Nola as she just hates watching people drown while she's eating lunch, and besides, she knows how bloated, broken bodies pollute the downstream and ruin the environment for all of us. Me, I just noshed away and watched the most likely candidates in patient hope. Must be the Texan in me.
(And yes, the falls themselves are a lovely jewel, clear and bright, and the pools between glowed with ice cream greens and blues.)
We finished our lox and cream cheese and crackers, took more pictures and headed back. No one fell in after all, which I suppose is all for the best, though off the trail and behind an old stump were two memorial crosses. Two women, same last name, born a few years apart. One had died in 1986 when she was seventeen, the other in 1998, at twenty-six. I could have noted the names more carefully, and googled when we got home, but I just don't want to know more than what I can surmise from doing the math.
Nola stalked and subverted a butterfly into sitting on her hand long enough for me to work out exposure and get some nice closeup shots of it. (She got more pictures of it when it took a break from licking her finger to perch on my hat.) One of my pictures turned out so badly over-exposed and out of focus it looks like I'd spent hours tweaking it and ruining my eyes just to get that effect.
Got home about six, pretty well drained from tramping in the sun. Slept like logs last night. We're planning this afternoon to go over the canoeing stuff and make sure everything's where we can get it and in good shape, in hopes that we can get out on the water tomorrow.
I'm several trips behind in uploading pictures to the photolog. I'll get caught up someday, or not. Meanwhile, I've tweaked the navigation to hopefully be a bit more sensible, and changed the main page to display the first shots from the last three sets uploaded rather than the last three pictures. The trick there was to define a special category ("albums") and assign it to the initial picture of each set, and then to restrict the main page to only display pictures in that category. Go me.
