Extreme

The problem with trying to describe the heli-hiking experience is the extremity of it all, from going point-to-point by helicopter, to huge mountains, tiny flowers, massive glaciers.
  
I'm 7,500 feet up in the mountains.  Usually I'm at sea level.  

Usually I walk on solid (fairly level) ground.  Now I'm walking through hilly forests, climbing above the tree line,  hiking on glaciers. 

Huge moving rivers of ice creep down to a chilled lake or stream of the palest blue.  Walking from a glacier across a world of broken shale so vast it seems like an alien landscape, there is suddenly a patch of tiny pink flowers in a bed of green.  

Water run off from Conrad Glacier, wildflowers making their way along the water's edge, rising from rocks and shale.

On one of our last hikes, as we stop for lunch,  the daring among us have an opportunity to do some more adventurous rock-climbing and/or rapelling.  I am not among the daring, but Linda is.

You can see her making her way up the cliff face.  Once again, the rock dwarfs the mere humans who would tackle it.  Yet she made it.

The mountains are so big, their size is hard to grasp.  I can put a person near the area where the glacier forms a lake and you can see the person looks like a speck in the picture.  Or I can photograph a helicopter that looks like an insect above the vast rocky landscape.

What looks like a hill is a mountain, a mile-and-a-half high and thirty miles away. Tiny flowers take a half century to be big enough to appear next to a man's shoe.   

Here's another picture that offers some perspective... Houndstooth Spire from the lodge and the hiker's hut near the right third of the picture, (circled). 

  

That 'little' hut  is about a four-hour hike from where I took this photo at the lodge. I needed binoculars to see it. The staff tells me it will sleep fifty--yes, they said 'fifty'.  Without the camera zoom, it's invisible.

And that monolith--Houndstooth Spire-- I think it's another four hour hike from the nearly-invisible hut.   It's easy to forget that the little green things in the foreground are actually towering pine trees.  

Then there's the emptiness.  You've seen people in my photos, but the fact is there seem to be about sixty people in the entire range while I am here.  Forty of us are hikers who came to the lodge.  Twenty work at the lodge.  That was it.  No one else.   I could see more people than that if I just walk to the end of my street. But in the mountains  I open the door to the lodge and I see ... no one (unless you count the moose and her baby who pass through one evening).

  Shale, mountains, tiny flowers, giant glaciers... it's difficult to grasp the extremes.

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