Walking into a Dream / Windblown Selfie

With a stretch of a few days of clear weather and cooler temps, my husband and I decided it was time to backpack into the Quehanna Wild Area. We'd talked about both one-night and two-night trips. According to the forecast, a bit of rain might buttress the trip on Monday and Thursday; what to do, what to do?

Monday morning found us packing our gear, and we just didn't finish up in time to make it worth our while to head out. So first thing Tuesday morning, with the car mostly packed and sandwiches already made, we packed the cooler and hopped in the car and headed for Quehanna, stopping along the way to tuck a quart of chili, cold, into the cooler for when we got home.

We parked the car and strapped all of our gear on and headed out into the back-country. It was like walking into a dream. Above is a photo of the foliage show, which at this point is an odd combination of semi-peak and mostly green (go figure) in the wild area. So in some areas, the colors were great; in others, not so much. In a few places, the leaves are actually down already.

It takes us just shy of an hour and a half to drive there, 20 or so minutes to pack our gear, and about an hour or so to walk the several miles to our back-country campsite in the Valley of the Elk. Would we see or hear elk or coyotes? Who knows? By mid-afternoon, we had our tents up and I was sitting on my favorite rock enjoying some fine views of the valley.

I wanted to take a selfie there, but the wind just was not cooperating. I switched to monochrome and took a few more, letting the wind blow my hair all over my face. In some strange way, it was oddly freeing having my eyes and actual face sort of obscured. 

I leaned into it, letting the wild wind caress my face. A friend said it reminded her of the manes of the ponies of Assateague, and I'll take that. So in the extras, there's a photo: something a bit different, a bit wilder and more windblown version of me than usual.

The temperatures fell into the 40s (our low for the night never dropped into the 30s at all), and I put on most of the gear I had brought with me. We ate sandwiches, enjoyed the candy and other snacks we'd brought along. Three cheers for cherry Zotz, a fizz powered candy we have just recently rediscovered!

And around 9 p.m., I started to say something about - well, we might hear elk and coyotes at 9 . . . or maybe not until midnight. And I stopped suddenly, because, guess what! Right at that moment, WE HEARD OUR FIRST BUGLES AND HOWLS! 

It was awesome. Especially appreciated was the fact that the critters did enough wild bugling and howling to please us, but not enough to keep us up all night. So hip hip hooray for the polite wild creatures of the Quehanna Wild Area!

Now, it's my custom to include a soundtrack song for each image. We always take music along with us to the wilderness, and on this evening, I heard a Heart cover of a Dylan tune that I didn't know we owned! So my song for the foliage shot above is Heart with Layne Staley, with Ring Them Bells. For the windblown selfie in the extras, I'm choosing Patrick Swayze's She's Like the Wind.