Blueberry hill
posted in Uncategorized |The advice from old-timers here is, if it’s clear and sunny out during August, take advantage of it. This includes OmegaDad’s new boss outright saying that if it’s a nice day, he should consider taking it off.
Well, okay, then. So Friday we went off to Margaret Pass in the sun. The part I love–with the Little Lady River barreling madly down from the mountains–turns out to be only a portion of the whole drive. You go further on, and you find alpine meadows with blueberry bushes.
The lady who manages the shoebox we’re living in told us, “Oh, you’ll know when you’ve hit the blueberries by all the bottoms sticking up”, and, sure enough, she was right.
First, we stopped for a picnic at Constitution Peak. The dotter has somehow learned to skip like a mountain goat from rock to rock, and she was darting around the edge of the river. She claimed it wasn’t cold; I don’t believe her.
Constitution Peak rears up from the road and river in an almost sheer stretch; its definitely the “angle of repose” all the way up. This is avalanche country, and there are warnings alongside the road (along with the “Recreational Gold Mining Allowed” signs). The mountain is covered with vivid green vegetation and looks emerald in the sunlight.
The river leaps and tumbles, and everywhere you look there are huge boulders and waterfall shelves. I hope the color shows in these pictures; part of the river is your normal river color, but the rest is an icy aqua blue.
After the picnic, we headed on up the road. And up the road. And up the road. Into the mountains. Higher and higher. (In reality, though the mountains are alpine mountains and we were above the treeline, we only got to 3,998 feet on this trip, which surprised me. I was thinking alpine vegetation equals alpine height; in the Arizona area we were from, you need to be up at about 12,000 feet to hit the treeline.
We were peering about, wondering where the blueberries were, when we turned a corner and saw them: people with their bottoms in the air as they leaned over picking blueberries. So we stopped at a handy parking area, emerged from the car, and picked berries.
Then it was time to head on, up and up some more, to Peak Lake, where we encountered paragliders leaping off cliffs, some families hiking with their dogs, and more out-of-state plates than I’ve seen in a week.
So. It’s God’s Country. Listen to OmegaMom lecturing herself about how she needs to wait for an entire year before she makes any judgments. We’ve got to do a winter here to know what it’s really like. Word has it that this past week is extremely unusual weather for August, that August is generally rainy and chilly every day. But so far…so far…well, it’s just glorious.
(BTW, excuse some of the lousy pictures. For some reason, my PhotoDraw is behaving badly and some of my edited pics are pixelating badly. Bah!)
