(written on October 24th from notes taken previously)
I was the first out of the van this morning, wandering around the campground and then down to the river again.
Wander, wander, wander.
When I got back, mom and Nancy were starting to be up and moving around, and we set one of the picnic tables up with a bunch of breakfast stuff and then ate breakfast together.
My mom and Nancy started talking about more Church/gospel stuff, and I went back to my playing with the German Shepherd while they talked, periodically swinging over to interject a thought or a joke or something.
They talked until somewhere around noonish, I think, at which point, my mom and I decided to head in up the road to Clearwater Lake, the end of the line, road wise, before everything turns backcountry.
We invited Nancy along, as we were enjoying her company, and she said she wanted to join us, so we left her car at a parking lot near our campground, and we all packed into Rover–my mom in the back, big puppy in the aisle (though he wanted nothing to do with that and climbed up toward the front with half his body on the cooler and the other half in the front), Nancy in the passenger seat and I driving.
Big puppy did not like being separated from his mom, nor being on the rather bumpy dirt road the main road turned into, adding quite a bit of whining and howling.
Kind of funny to see a big dog be so seemingly scared.
We stopped to take pictures at least once, and maybe more than once on the way up to the lake.
When we got to the lake, we ultimately parked down where the boat ramp was. There was a family there loading up a couple of boats for an extended camping trip on the other end of the lake–on the wild side. 🙃
We ate sandwiches for lunch, played fetch with The Big puppy, and then I stripped down to just my shorts to take a bath in the frigid lake.
And it was indeed, cold.
It wasn’t, however, as cold as the snow-melt waterfall pool in Colorado that was so cold it really really hurt to be in the water for more than seconds.
I bathed using (my earth-friendly soap 😁) and swam for a bit in an effort to coax the big puppy to jump off the dock…
But he was having none of that. 😆
Nice to be clean, though, and i love how refreshing the cold water feels.
After getting back in dry land, drying off, and putting some dry clothes on, I came back and noticed a dragon fly drowning in the lake, so I rescued it, and we got some great close ups of it with my phone camera.
Those things looke so cool up close.
From there, we headed back down the road to Nancy’s car.
When we got there, she asked me some question about the car, and I started looking things over a bit for her, finding that her oil was low (at minimum), and her coolant was super low (nothing in the tank, and nothing visible in the radiator from the top).
😶
Gratefully, her car used the same kind of oil as Rover, and gratefully, I had brought plenty of extra oil, along with plenty of coolant.
So I topped off both her oil and coolant, and yet again, instead of parting ways, I found a recreation site near a waterfall off east of the main road on a dirt road that headed way up into the hills, and she decided she wanted to join us again, so we all headed for Silvertip Falls recreation site, stopping off briefly at Helmcken Falls on the way back. (I think it’s like a 3 or 400-foot falls? (It looks nearly identical to Spahat Falls, from our first day in Wells Gray, just a lot taller)
Helmcken Falls was the original place we had intended to meet Nancy the first day we met her. She had gone to it the second day but then had felt sort of drawn to find us and had left Helmcken quickly to find us, and that’s why we ran into her again at Dawson.
Anyway, we got to Helmcken at dusk, almost dark, taking a few pictures with the last particles of light, before heading the 45ish minutes down the main road and up the fairly rough dirt road to Silvertip Falls recreation site.
It was dark by the time we got there, but I was bound and determined to have a campfire 🙃, so I scoured the damp woods for wood to burn and gratefully was able to get a fire going.
Nancy had a string of lights that she strung up in the nearby shrubs. I think maybe that’s a bear deterrent? I didn’t think to ask, just thought it was cool to hang the lights. 😊
We sat around the fire, ate dinner around the fire (beans and tortillas and salsa, I think it was was), and then Nancy got her guitar and played a little before she handed it to me, pulled out her book of songs, and we both sang the songs while I played (often tried to play the chords, Darn you “Save Tonight” and your crazy chord progressions!).
We had an absolute blast, talking and singing and laughing and joking and just… enjoying each other’s company–Nancy trying to slyly record us playing and singing together. 🙃
Good times. 😊
We let the fire die down, and I got my mom off to bed. Then I came back to just be by the fire as it burned itself out.
And… I’ll pick it up again in the next post!
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 