Not so much adventure today, although it could have been.
I stopped in the Shop Easy for a bottle of juice. I love small towns…where else do you see baby food etc on one side of the aisle, fishing tackle and fish bonkers right next to it, and motor oil and crab traps across the aisle?
I didn’t have a lot left to do at the hatchery, but I headed there to get the last bit of interviewing done. It was a quiet day at the hatchery, a couple of guys took off to go fishing, one fellow had to get his hay in, another was smoking fish in his spare moments. I love the pace here. I hung out at the facility and did some work as the breezes blew through the open doors.
Tourists drifted in and were received by the two young ladies who work here in the summer. All tours are guided here, no one walks around unattended. In the three days here there haven’t been many tourists until today….I can only come to the conclusion that the ferry must have come today.
At the end of the day I decide to see if I can make it to a place Hawkins (a young summer worker) has said is a worthwhile drive. Purgatory Peak….hmmmm…I mention I have a van and he says he made it in a car, only bottoming out a few times….hmmmmm…he says there are falls and ice caves…..well, no guts no glory!
I head out and up the Forestry road. I take it slow and easy, gently ease the van through the holes in the road creep up the track…it really is more of a track than a road….but it’s in pretty good shape overall.
On and on I go. A deer wanders off the road and into the bush, a squirrel shoots across to the other side, then another, lots of bear piles on the road, but that’s the sum total of today’s wildlife viewing.
I bump along for about an hour and the road starts to deteriorate. I start thinking about how long it would take me to walk out of here if something happened…and the company I might share in the woods….this would be so easy in my 4runner….but this isn’t the 4runner….it’s time to turn around. It was a nice drive anyway.
I pop out back onto the pavement about 45 minutes later and head back to the Inn after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to find the trail to Schoolhouse Falls. After a look on Google Earth and my GPS trail I see that I was still quite some distance from my destination….I feel better that it wasn’t right around the next corner anyway.