Vesper Peak

As I had mentioned in some Headlee Pass post, I wanted to hike up to Vesper Peak, but had to stop at the pass because I started extremely late and had flat out ran out of time. Well, I also forgot to mention that when I hiked my sorry as up 2.5 miles to the pass and finally got a view of the peak off in the distance with a traverse across loose rock field…my mind went, “Oh hell no!” Loose rock field is creepy especially with a deep mountain valley to catch your sad tumbling body. Then looking at the mountain it seems a bit insane to just walk up the face of that thing. I was scared. So of course I had to go back ASAP!

Saturday was foggy and hazy everywhere, I think it’s the first less than awesomely sunny day since my sad backpacking trip. I think I’ve got some kind of weird cool hike curse where the fogs roll in and follow me. Some people have storm clouds following them. I get the fog of war…it’s like playing StarCraft, except wherever the mouse goes, you stop seeing stuff.

If you don’t care for the view so much, hiking in the fog is actually nice, it made the hike back up to Headlee Pass super easy with the nice cool air. The best part of it all was it made the rock traverse easy because my problem with that area is looking at the depth and getting freaked out by my stupid fear of height. You can’t be afraid of height when you can’t see how high up you are. At some point in the middle of the traverse I laughed at myself for being afraid in the first place. The fog stayed pretty thick from the pass to the peak, so I couldn’t see too far out in every direction…just kept hiking upwards. Overall, I thought some of the reviews of this hike made it sound a lot harder than it is. It’s an awesome hike, and I’ll definitely do it again maybe next year on a clear day.

Hidden somewhere in this hike is some good old fashion mountain philosophy for life...sometimes when you look too far ahead, things can scare you into not moving, if you just look at the next few steps and keep moving, you'll find that things are neither scary nor hard.

Slide of hike here.