March Madness Pre-empted
Sunday, the last day of winter, came up just gorgeous, if a little cool. Our son recently came into a great opportunity to rent a cabin with a climbing buddy in Index, WA, within walking distance of one of the finer climbing walls in the state. So, let me get this straight in my head. My kid, living with me and partially employed, has vacation property and I don’t? I don’t blame him - it’s a sweet deal.
He called from there Sunday morning and said it would be a great day for us to come up. Mrs. Perils, afraid that he’d dragoon her into climbing on routes that would kick her ass, demurred with the palliative “this sounds like a great father-son outing”. I’m thinking that he really wanted to go climbing and enlist Mrs. Perils as his belay slave, but when he saw that I’d arrived alone, sans climbing gear, it seemed that he was secretly relieved that he wouldn’t be climbing. We agreed on some hiking plans, and headed out.
If you recall, I lost my Canon S300 digital camera last summer during a trip to Index to hang with Andrew and Mrs. Perils while they rock-climbed. I didn’t grieve for the camera so much as I did some spectacular photo ops I had that day that disappeared with the camera. I got the opportunity to revisit them Sunday, as we took the same hike that I did last summer.
Clicky-click to enlarge any of these:
Here’s the little pied a terre. It looks to be about 100 years old, but with new wiring. The floor cants palpably, and doorways are parallelograms instead of rectangles (and I know that a rectangle is a parallelogram, but this isn’t College Quiz Bowl).
At the top of our hike, looking east towards Stevens Pass, the town of Index below. The strange shadow is there because this photo is a stitch of two different snapshots.
I set the 10-second timer and backed cautiously up to the precipice. Got seated just in time.
Mount Index.
Ya seen one snow-covered peak, ya seen ‘em all, right? It’s my privilege to test your patience.
Index Creek, as sunset reddens the peaks in the background.
