Day 1, the scramble

That day, and the following day, have become a tremendous blur in my memory. Wild dashes over incredible landscapes. Scrambling up and down steep lines of parallel ridges - up and over one ridge, up and over the next, up and over the next. Sliding down ravines in a rubble of glacial-moraine round stones - a forty-five degree slope composed entirely of perfectly round 4" rocks that tumbled under foot endlessly like huge marbles. Clambering over literally thousands of fallen tree trunks that continually reached up with their broken branches to try to trip you as you leapt over. Coming abruptly to a halt as you realized you'd walked into a complicated three-dimenstional trap of huge fallen trunks in all direction, and negotiating your way out like a monkey, always thinking: where can I climb out where I only need one hand, and will not trip?

You never knew where your foot was going to come down - in a hole between boulders, in a nest of interlocking branches deceptively covered with grass; I developed a secret horror of getting my foot trapped, falling forward with my own momentum and breaking my ankle.

It is a beautiful state of mind, to be hiking straight through a patch of wilderness with absolutely no idea what is in front of you, with no regard to terrain, topography, habitat direction or trails. Just following the "WOOOO" of the radio hum on your antenna, wherever it leads you. One minute I'd be scrambling through a deep, dark pine woods filled entirely with eerie fallen silver trunks draped in moss. The next second I'd pop out into the sun and be sprinting through an open glade full of thousands, thousands, THOUSANDS of tiny blue lupines underfoot. Then into an eerie shaded glade with a single glowing red lily spotlit in the center. Next another sheer ledge of those tiny, round boulders that shifted and spun underfoot as I scrambled down them. I'd stagger around a turn, puff my way up a ledge, wedge my way through a dense tangle of scratchy branches, burst through the trees, and BOOM there would be the Tetons, the mighty mountain range rearing across the whole western horizon, and a vast field of tiny sunflowers all facing exactly in the sun's direction. Scramble, scramble, scramble - now we're in sagebrush - now a lily-covered pond - uh-oh, now another hill to climb - back into the dark pine woods -

I've never ever been so relentlessly exhausted in my entire life. There was no way to ever take a break - if you wanted to take your jacket off, take a drink of water, get a stone out of your shoe - you couldn't, because - there goes the bird! "THERE HE GOES, THERE HE GOES!"