Beautiful extravagant wretched excessiveness.

The baby and wife went to Atlanta for a vacation (of course, Atlanta in August, who wouldn’t?). I had something like a vacation, too, only different: too much red meat, too much red wine, too much bacon, too much biking, too much hiking, too much beer, too many late nights.

Sad but true.

A guide book had said it was 10 miles to Sundance Pass. The sign at the trailhead then said it was 11 miles. It ended up being 11.6 according to my GPS, for a nice 23-mile day.

Weather report at 11,000 feet: brisk, but colorful.

Anyway, this hike resulted in some unsightly blisters. For a follow-up I decided to stumble around Mystic Lake. But when I got there I felt pretty good, so I decided to make a late-morning rush for the Froze-to-Death Plateau, just because I like the name. But I was too late and got turned back by storms at mile 7.

During the week I asked around about my blisters (fun topic of conversation, by the way, and plenty of lively debate). It was advised that I spend about $100 on fancy socks and fancy liners, or just wear sandals. So the next time I went hiking I wore sandals.

The sandals, I’m surprised to report, work pretty well, though do leave some room for improvement when it comes to crossing snowfields and scrambling around on scree.

(Wallowa River. Luckily, I heard the word ‘Wallowa’ mentioned on the radio, so I now know how to pronounce it: Wuh-louw-ah, with the ‘louw’ rhyming with ‘now’. Though it was AM radio, so I could have misheard it over the static.)

After my success with an 18-mile hike in Chacos I tempted fate and did another 18-miler. At the end I was delighted to find an entire meadow full of my favorite wildflower. (I thought this one did not grow south of Montana.)

After that it was a long drive back to Missoula, the highlight of which was avoiding an elk in the highway a ways off Lolo Pass. I got home at 1 a.m., unloaded the cooler, took a shower, and went to bed, only to wake up four hours later and go to the office. Sometimes when you go away and have a full weekend, it seems like when you get to work on Monday everything is different. Nope, not this time. Everything stayed the same. Here’s a picture of me making some copies: