Badger pass

I love this shot of Miriam - she looks so happy and alive.

That's how this place makes you feel - free, full of energy and vitality. Today was maybe the highlight of our whole trip. We had an epic hike over our highest pass, still covered in snows. Through sinuous braided river valleys and over broken fields of talus rock. We stopped for lunch in the snow over the pass in the bright sun. The last of my tortillas with some smoked meat and dijon mustard never tasted so good...

Some of the guys slid down an enormous snow field and horsed around in ridiculous flying leaps off the embankment. Over the pass the apparitions of alpine marmots were like phantoms disappearing over the rocky slopes into their burrows. And the whole valley was like a giant amphitheater of echoing slabs of rock, erie and mysterious. Descending lower through tamarack forests I picked wild morel mushrooms for dinner while swatting at hordes of mosquitos and wading through cold stream crossings as we went.

Our camp was a big open flood plain valley between two mountain ranges. We cooked the wild mushrooms up with a huge pasta dinner under a tarp as a big storm came in, then vanished leaving the forests silently dripping water in the twilight. It was like the climax of our trip that day over the pass now I'm confronted with coming down. I don't want to leave....