Don't Yuck MyYum

Don't yuck anyone's yum. Jack said that to me, and is it not just the best advice ever. Live Your Life, You do you, let it be, be kind, all of those ideas in one sentence.

Hike your hike.

Mud season is upon us and it causes cravings for The Naked Peaks of the lowest and smallest buttes, and their luscious brown faces bared to the sun. Yet oddly enough this season of Melt limits progress more than the long loooooong months of snow. To further fuel these longings, I am currently dedicating my free time, (and sometimes even work time, OK mostly work time) to the reading of An Appalachian Trail Journal called Then the Hail Came

http://www.skwc.com/exile/Hail-nf.html

As well as a Trail Book for the Gros Ventre and surrounding area. Self torture or sadistic pleasure, you just go ahead and judge.

So where to go, when you cannot yet go up? To The Rivers.

The banks usually lose the snow pack enough to tread along. So Pi and I took the Gros Ventre River for a spin.

It was fantastic, we covered a bit less than 4 miles, but it was a bushwhacking bliss. We slogged through thigh deep slush, and ice bound bogs. We slipped through half eaten willow paths,  and crouched beneath heavy boughs of pine. Skipped over river rock beds and skirted sheer ledges that drooped almost longingly, into the calmly churning depths  of the clearest greenest water.

We encountered two large Moose early on in the hike  they watched us as we took photos from MORE than 50/yards away (because safety first, eh hem tourists). They trounced off and Pi and I continued on. We later encountered these two again, and once more  they pranced away.

Pi would like for me to take this moment and thank all the beavers for working so diligently to prepare those long sharp logs and leave them strewn about just for him, He thoroughly enjoyed galloping carelessly through the snow and river and right into my legs. However pay back was mine when, I quite literally, crashed into their lodge.

As we followed the river, more and more beaver logs were abandoned so temptingly on the steep bank of the river. Causing a very narrow and occasionally sketchy bit of path. We happened upon a scattering of logs and sticks, branches and oddly perfect sized fetching sticks. Too many of which had been chewed at both ends by a long toothed rodent to be a coincidence. I figured this was a beaver dam but it looked incomplete, and was tucked into the overhanging bank. Turns out, No, it wasn't an incomplete dam, it was the lodge.

I began to walk across it (as the snowpack was making this bramble crossing the best option), and My right foot crumpled through a tangle of twigs into empty space clear past my knee. I wasn't yet convinced this was the lodge, as it could have just been a poorly made dam, or maybe a cache, it just looked like a pile of sticks not really 'assembled'  as dams usually look. What convinced me was the beaver that appeared just behind Pi and I in the river slapping it's tail and trying to get our attention a mere moment after my slip into what I can only assume was the agitated critters living room. I stayed for about a minute and took a short video (it's on my Instagram almostrootbeer) then we turned back and let the rodents have their peace. 

A very relaxing way to wander the afternoon away.