Unexpected Saturdays
All week long Mark and I had been planning a backpacking trip into the Comanche Peak Wilderness, to get some altitude and flush out the bivy system to be used on our up coming climb of the Grand Teton. However, on Friday all of that changed.
I don’t need to explain the nitty gritties here, but suffice to say it’s the second week of June and there’s still more than 12ft of snow at our reserved campsite below the Grand, gas prices are ultra high and we’d rather be driving our Prius than the suv on vacation this summer, and we haven’t been to the midwest during a warm month in almost 4 years. We decided to ditch the plans to climb the Grand and take our vacation with my family in St Louie over the 4th of July.
Thus, we awoke Saturday morning with no need to train for a mountain climb, and no real desire to go through the trouble and pain of hauling all of our climbing gear out to climb at Lumpy. Mark got up around 6:30a with the dog and then called me 15 minutes later to tell me there were three baby foxes out playing in the grass near our house.
So now, rather than getting ready to climb, I was sneaking through the grass with a 300mm lens for an hour.
When I got home, the neighborhood garage sale was just starting. Mark and I had prepared a garage full of stuff to sell, and our neighbor, Jenifer, had agreed to sell it in our absence this weekend. As I opened the garage, though, a crowd descended on our pile and people started throwing cash at me. All plans for climbing on Saturday were immediately canceled in favor of participation in that all-American of summer Saturday activities: the garage sale.
Even though we didn’t get out on any fantastic new rocks, we had a great time on Saturday. I love the photos I managed to grab, and I will likely be posting more shots of the little guys in the next few weeks as they get out of their den more.
The garage sale was a huge success: we unloaded everything we wanted to and walked away with almost $200! I could write a whole post about how surprised I was to find myself enjoying the yard sale ritual even though I had intended to sell everything on Craig’s List. Fort Collins is an interesting and fun town, and the people who stopped by our little garage were a diverse and happy lot. It turned out to be a really nice day all around.
what! no teton?! that’s a bummer that the war in iraq and the bush administration have ruined your vacation plans, but at least you’ll get to see your family.
Yeah, I suppose I never thought that far back. The gas prices are pretty obvious, but the snow was a bigger factor for us. We have like NO snow safety skllls, and I didn’t want to be worried about avalanches on our descent. bah!
So, Bush Administration = Global Warming = Increasing hydrological cycle = too much snow in the Tetons! (for now)
Damn you W! :)
Or, maybe it’s all his fault that we’ll be eating tasty BBQ, fried chicken, and playing Rock Band all week instead of sleeping in the snow and freaking out about Bears.
Score one W! :)
Those are some amazing foxy photos.
No Grand is okay, but I think you should keep hiking anyway :)