Home for the Holidays, Thanksgiving!

Once again heading West to sunny Vancouver for the holiday. During the 80s and 90s I generally spent Thanksgiving up in the Thompson Plateau enjoying the cabin and getting ready for winter. The best time of the year in the mountains is April thru June and then September and October. The summer months can be very hot and not conducive to meditating or translating. Mid November is the average point for the first real snow and then after that it can accumulate pretty quickly. I remember one night going to sleep with the outside temperature at 25 F and waking up in the morning thinking the door had somehow come open. The outside temperature was -5 F. A nasty cold front had come through and stayed. Although usually the weather turns cooler and the winds start to come from the North in mid October - watch out past mid November. Thanksgiving is guaranteed good weather - global warming considered of course.

I hope to head up to the cabin on Tuesday or Wednesday morning and spend at least one night with a roaring fire, a gently splashing creek and a big wide starry sky. With luck I will be woken in the night by the howling of wolves or coyotes, maybe the nocturnal visit of a bear foraging in the dark. The water will be cold, there are 11 crossings. At this time of the year some of those crossings are shallow and there are enough large dry rocks to jump onto and cross without getting wet. If it is raining on the way up it is better to stay in the water for the crossings and avoid the slippery rocks. The last crossing is the most treacherous because it is the narrowest and therefore potentially the deepest water. The path must be picked carefully. Past that point it doesn't get any easier as there have been serious rock slides in the last ten years. Steep rock faces on the Western side rise over a thousand feet. Twenty minutes past that and the trail becomes easier although seriously over grown, especially in the last 10 years. The cabin is not so far after that, but if you don't know where it is, it will be very difficult to find.

Yes I have used the Mountain Goat image once before. The first post ever for this Travel Blog was decorated with this photo. I like it, but no it was not taken at the cabin. The largest animal I photographed at the cabin was a female moose and boy was it big. Never get in the way of a moose. The Mountain Goat was photographed several hundred feet above the cabin. I was meditating in a cave when I chanced to look across the gorge and saw a Mountain Goat looking directly at me - probably wondering what the hell I was doing. Snap, I took the photo.