High above Treeline

Updrafts of warm winds whispered against sun-hot skin. The smell of horse sweat and leather. And mountains caressed with green and brown velvet textures that were outlined with cobalt blue highliner. Backcountry days like this you treasure for the memory of visual overload. Of views that start way down on the Jumping Pound Creek and then through thickly forested slopes of pines - lodgepole, jack and higher rarer examples of limber and whitebark. Tiny spruces as finally the trail goes into sub-alpine meadows that are what's known as 'kruppelholz' or 'crippled wood'. They may look like baby trees but are mature, sometimes ancient specimens. Hikers and mountain bikers had left their footprints and tracks but all, on this fragile terrain, were meticulously and carefuly on the trails here, sometimes of shale powder. And, once we heaved (on foot I was puffing like a steam train and personally producing enough steam myself, grin, at that........) to the summits, my, the panoramas up here are........well, simply, you can see for miles onto every terrain going. And the quiet. Absolute total aching silence through the trees, and even atop the ridgelines only mere whispers of wind. An incredible day along the Jumping Pound Summit Trail.