Breaking my New Year's Resolution???

 

As I posted on January 1st, my resolution for 2025 was to do an outdoor hike of at least five miles every single day this year, no exceptions, no excuses.  It's been great motivation, and it had been a very positive experience on balance ... so far.

But what about injuries?  What about a catastrophic illness?  What if I'm kidnapped by Aliens?

Shit happens, right?  Just look at that photo of my left ankle.  It was May 6th.  The story is such a typical one.  It was not a hiking-related injury.  I was preparing stuff in the kitchen and dropped something really hard and heavy, and tried to intercept it—to break its fall—with my foot, soccer style.  Big, stupid mistake.  It clobbered that ankle, which is always sensitive because there's a bone chip in there from when I broke my ankle 37 years ago and the orthopedic surgeon told me he wasn't going to operate because the ankle was stable enough.

It hurt like hell.  It began to swell up, and soon the swelling had spread all the way up my lower leg to my knee.  I could barely walk.  The pain was biblical!

I would surely have to stay off the leg until the swelling went down, right? 

Well, I wasn't going to give up without trying.  I took some aspirin (I don't even keep Ibuprofen around) and headed out to at least try to walk a bit.

It was pure torture.  I limped along gamely for just a single mile, and it took an hour and a half.  But then the aspirin seemed to kick in, just enough that I was able to pick up my pace.  It was still as painful as a root canal, but I could see hope of getting in the five miles and living to tell about it - keeping the resolution alive for at least another day.

And I did it.  It was no fun at all, to say the least, but I'd had a day like that with a twisted ankle when I hiked the AT in 2012, and it all worked out for the best.  Back then, I had been almost back to normal the next day.

But that was a twisted ankle.  This was a blunt-force trauma injury.  What would it be like the next day?

May 7th: The swelling was down, back to just a very sensitive local area around the ankle.  I headed out to try to walk and was shocked to find that walking did not aggravate the pain.  This was not systemic, not down in the guts of my foot where bones rub together.  I was able to get my five miles in at almost a normal pace.  And best of all, I was able to actually enjoy the experience!

Normal service resumed!  New Year's Resolution kept alive ... at least until the next big disaster strikes.

That January 1st post has grown long and unwieldy, so I'm retiring that one and picking up the coverage here.

Spring has sprung and it's one of the best times of the year to be out.  The bugs haven't proliferated yet, temperature hasn't gone into a tropical sizzle, the new greenery is all fresh and perky, and the birds are singing up a storm, and I'm loving my life in the woods again, and eager to share my joy, whether in words or in photos.  

The Month of May was a delight.  I had no more problems with that ankle, except for the usual twinges of that bone chip, and hiked a total of 187.653 miles.  Five months of adhering to the resolution—seven to go. 

In June the heat arrived.  Priority for hiking was to get out as soon as daylight arrived, often as early as 5:30AM.  Trying to stay in the deep woods as much as possible, and hiking along my wonderful noisy cool streams at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  The water in those streams never gets truly warm—65 degrees F at the very warmest.  Total miles hiked in June, just 2½ miles shy of 200.  This month puts me past the 15 total years of documented hiking with a GPS and gets me past the half-way point on the Journey to Nowhere other than to daily consistency that is this year's New Year's Resolution.  Total miles for June: 197.572.

July was brutal.  I spent most of the month walking from before sunrise to a few hours after sunrise, not often able to 'stop and smell the roses' because of the oppressive humidity—I just wanted to finish—but also because of the swarming, relentless eye gnats that seem to want nothing more than to commit suicide by dive-bombing into your eye.  This was the month that I realized why this resolution is a real challenge, even if I remain healthy and fit.  It is, on some days, keeping me from spending the time I want focusing on other things—things that I can do indoors, bathed in a fossil-fuel-generated artificial environment of 'conditioned' air, something I grew up without in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Was it cooler in mid-summer back then?  You bet your sweaty head band it was!  Total miles for July: 174.777.

In August, I started toying with the idea of hiking one small (0.065-mile) piece of the Appalachian Trail, past a tree with a nice white blaze on both sides:

as many times as there are completions of the entire AT reported to the AT Conservancy.  That would be more than 25,000 as of their most recent report.  Not yet fully committed to that goal, but I did walk back and forth on various days until the total passes reached 500.  This had already been part of a longer piece of trail to a viewpoint that I had hiked more than 100 times over the years (about 0.8 miles long).  August is also the month when I stop exploring and bushwhacking in the woods because the yellow-jacket wasps, which live big hives in holes in the ground, begin to very aggressively defend the space around those nests because the new Queens are hatching.  Amazingly, bears love to dig up those colonies to eat all the juicy protein-packed grubs, surely getting a bazillion stings to the nose in the process.  Blessed cooler air arrived around the last week of the month and has hung around.  Total miles for August: 175.049.

Total documented miles hiked since I started recording my walks with a GPS on June 12, 2010:  25,834.503 miles!

Photo Archive follows:

This is Western Maidenhair Fern, one of my favorite deep-woods plants, and very difficult for gardeners to grow.  It's called 'western' because its range is up and down the US west coast--including among the huge Redwoods and up into Alaska among the giant Sitka Spruces, growing all the way out into the Aleutian Islands.  But somehow there's a rogue colony of it in the mid-Atlantic, and it's actually reasonably common around here.  (There's another colony in Vermont).  I love the way ferns unfurl in spring, and the delicate, fractal-like geometry of their leaf pattern.  Walked past two small clusters of these on May 10th, not on any real trail--just a route I took through the woods around my retreat at the Cloister at Three Creeks.

White Spotted Slimy Salamander (yes, that's it's official name, not my description).  Accidentally discovered when I turned over a log on June 1st.  Native to the Blue Ridge and vicinity in the Mid-Atlantic.

May 13th: Flooding rains at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is a view at the convergence of two creeks.  The water was higher in this episode than it was here in the Blue Ridge of central Virginia during Hurricane Helene last fall, and the biggest flood I've ever seen here since moving here about 4 years ago.

Tulip Poplar flower.  This has been my favorite species of tree since I was a kid and planted a seedling and watched it grow to more than 100 feet tall and four feet in diameter.  Yes, it's a fast-growing species. It has a truly unique leaf shape (also shown in the image) and these unique flowers that bloom in May.

May 16th: This is not a fungus.  It is called 'Wolf's Milk' and it is a slime mold--related to the single celled amoeba, these 'creatures' exist independently as single cells most of the time, and yet they signal each other chemically when conditions are right, and aggregate into these pustules in order to reproduce.

Stopping for a break beside a noisy mountain stream, the biggest of the three at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  June 21st.

Pine log with a display of knots, one of a bazillion blowdowns caused by Hurricane Helene and cleared from the Mountains-to-Sea Trail near Asheville, NC, where I did a few hikes.  August 5th.

August 25th.  The Crane Fly orchid has a bizarre lifestyle.  This is the shoot of the single leaf it unfurls in September, which hangs around the forest floor all winter absorbing sunlight, and shrivels up in spring.  Just one leaf, never more.  Then the plant sits dormant until it puts out a leafless flower stalk in July.

New Year's Resolution 2025 - Walk 10,000 steps every day

What's in a trail name?  On the Appalachian Trail, it is sort of a rite of passage to be bestowed your trail name by fellow hikers.  So far, I've not had that honor.  The only 'nickname' that I've ever been given (by two of my high school best friends a full 60 years ago) was based on this old hat that I used to wear as a counter-culture message in my hippie and pre-hippie rebellion days.  I'll let you guess what that name was (big hint in the image below).  Since then, I've always gone by trail names that I assigned myself:  'Seeks It' during my AT double thru-hike in 2012, 'Hiking Hermit' in more recent years, then briefly 'Mud' as a protest to a counter-intuitive Leave-No-Trace guideline, and most recently ORNG (Out Roaming Nature's Grandeur/Old Ranger Nearly Geriatric).  But I think I'll go back to the original and wear the hat for a while.  That hat is, believe it or not, a Templeform fedora made by Stylepark and bought by my Dad at Strawbridge and Clothier's original downtown Wilmington, DE store in the early to mid 1950's.  Yes, this was his go-to-church dress hat in the era before trucker caps (ball caps with non-baseball logos) became the new vogue.  Photo taken at the Cloister at Three Creeks on March 31st, 2025, with trees just barely beginning to bud out.

2025 is my 77th year on this planet.  I feel amazing and energetic and truly blessed to be still alive, let alone to be able to get out in nature and walk.   I'm astounded to see that nearly half of the men my age in the US have already kicked the bucket by this age (Social Security Actuarial Life Tables for 2024).  I'm beating the odds.  What did I do to deserve that???

Maybe part of the answer is the walking itself.  Honestly, I'd like to get up on a soapbox and preach the amazing benefits of walking and getting out in the peace and serenity of nature.  But all these things are pretty well known, and writers much more talented than me have expounded and pontificated and proselytized on these subjects at length.  I don't need to add to their wisdom.

My walks are the most important part and the best part of every day for me.  I'll even feel a sense of withdrawal and regret if I have to miss a day of hiking, and so when I got up this morning, it seemed natural to consider a New Year's resolution to help me avoid those few days when I just don't feel like going out because the weather is bad, or because I'm tangled up in some indoor sit-down project.  "Sitting is the new Smoking", right.  The chair is going to kill us all!

I already have good habits regarding the walking lifestyle.  When I wake up in the morning, one of the first things on my mind is "where do I want to hike today."  I like to vary my walks, both in the actual route, and also in the reason, theme, or goal of the day's outing.  Some days I'll walk to a store, buy what I can carry back home in my daypack, and save the planet a little by leaving my car parked at home.  Some days I'm looking for a particular feature of nature, such as which flowers are in bloom, how the seasons are changing the woods.

In general, I'm always looking for interesting things to photograph, usually something unusual, whether its natural or some sort of man-made oddity.  Sometimes, for example, I'll take photos of a plant that I don't know and then get on Google's 'search by image' feature to try to identify it when I get back home. 

I love sharing my photographs, so that becomes part of the motivation for creating this blog post.  It will serve to make me accountable for my resolution and to give me the excuse to do a 'show and tell' with one or a few photos from the day's hike.

And so, without further ado.  Here we go.  The resolution is basic and simple.  Here are the rules:

• Walk Ten Thousand Steps.  That's nominally five miles, and since I use a GPS and not a Pedometer, I'm measuring distance, not actually counting steps.  My goal is to hike at least five miles each day in 2025, and probably for the rest of my days - as long as I can haul my carcass out of bed in the morning and strap on a belt pack and get out the door.
• Always walk outdoors in a natural setting.  No tread mills.  No gyms.
• Rain or Shine.  No excuses, no exceptions.
• Take at least one photo of an interesting sight and feature it here on this blog post
• Do a little trail work along the way - pick up litter or cut back some brush (I always carry a hand pruning shear in my beltpack).

The creation of this post was my main motivation for the inaugural New Year's Day hike.  I intend to update this post every day, adding a new photo up top and describing the day's hike and distance covered.  The Chronological List of 2025 hikes begins below:

1. Jan 1:  Destination: Sewell's Orchard Pond, Columbia, MD.  5.212 miles.
2. Jan 2:  Sweet Hours Park, Eden Brook Rd., Kings Contrivance Trails, 6.51 miles.
3. Jan 3:  Destination: Walmart! 5.374 miles.
4. Jan 4:  Big Loop around Owen Brown Community.  "Track 11" - a specially designed Loop to be 5 miles: 5.073 as measured today.
5. Jan 5:  Wincopin Trails - Red, White, Yellow, Orange, and Purple.  5.139 miles.
6. Jan 6:  Destination: daughter's house in 6 inches of snow, 8.223 miles.
7. Jan 7:  Patuxent Branch Trail and Lake Elkhorn.  5.362 miles.
8. ... and on we go.  Because of very low view-counts on this post, I'm not updating this daily.  I'll report monthly, probably, and surely when I get to the magical 'virtual round-the-world hike' mark, at 25,000 miles.

January 2025 total: 171.224 miles.  

February 2025 total: 146.785 miles.  

March 2025 total:  173.620 miles.

April 14th, 2025 was the big day: I surpassed the 25,000-mile mark.  I've 'resolutely' kept to the resolution, having hiked at least 5 miles every day this year so far, and have no intention to stop now.

April 2025 total: 173.826 miles.  And on we go ... but ... 

***Because this post is getting long and unwieldy, and because of some breaking news regarding this ongoing quest, I'm migrating the coverage to a new blog post.  Check it out for the current progress.***

* * *

I hope 2025 finds you, dear readers, healthy and full of joy, and getting the chance to get outdoors as often as possible and take a walk.  Cheers!

* * *

PHOTO ARCHIVE

Plastic Trail!  January 1st.  The world is being drowned in plastic, but ... Really???  Plastic trail???  Yep.  This is the first all-plastic trail I've hiked.  Usually this is just a regular asphalt-paved bike and hiker trail, but the slabs of plastic were laid down over it for heavy equipment during a utility construction project.

Pond on a winter morning - January 2.  I'm showing this photo upside down because I think it looks better that way.  What do you think?

January 4, early on a frigid, windy Saturday morning. Wind chill in the teens.  Saying "Hi" and also, really, "Good-bye" to the church I used to attend fifteen years ago: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia (MD).  Back then, I felt very at home there, but the supposedly wide-open and inclusive-of-all UU "theology" has become more and more dogmatic--not in a spiritual way, but politically.  Sadly, they seem to have been sucked into the ever-increasing polarization problem in the US.  I made a few return visits recently but no longer feel comfortable there.

January 5th:  Frazil ice flowing with the current.  Early morning on the Middle Patuxent River beneath I-95.

January 7th: Lake Elkhorn, with two willow trees that really, REALLY like the water.

January 10: Canada Geese hunkering down in an aeration opening in the ice.  Sewell's Orchard Park Pond.

January 13:  Fun with symmetry: an old churchyard tulip poplar tree.

January 15 (at right).  The historic Pratt Truss Bridge built in 1902, now the signature feature of the Patuxent Branch Trail.  At left is my photo from November 28, 2011, the first time I hiked here.

January 17: The walk along Stoney Creek, heading up to the Cloister at Three Creeks.

Jan 19:  deep in the gloom of an impending storm, beside the ecological wasteland of a mown field, we enjoy the ever-hopeful catkins of a sweet birch awaiting spring while basking in a gorgeous Blue Ridge view.

Jan 21:  Bird on a tree-top twig.  Can you spot it?  The clouds are pointing to it.

Jan 22:  View from a hayfield of the peak called 'Three Ridges'.  The treetops there reach well above 4000 feet elevation, though the actual ground doesn't quite exceed that magic threshold. 

January 24:  Three Ridges framed by a badly invasive Paulownia Tree, native to China.

Jan 26:  Three pics for the price of one.  Rainbow Ice falls along the closed Blue Ridge Parkway.

Jan 27:  Ice covered "Stairstep falls".  The trail to get there was almost as treacherous.

February 3:  The first 'wild' flowers to bloom in spring are Skunk Cabbage.  Buds are opening today during a thaw.  The flowers are enclosed in that protective sheath to keep them warm, and the flowers themselves actually generate their own heat by a chemical process.  An extreme adaptation to beat the competition!

February 6:  the noisy abundance of a mountain stream - Stoney Creek at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is my new favorite viewpoint.  We had an inch of rain that had just ended; the roar of a hundred little 'water features' was a wealth of soothing joy!

February 18:  Icicles on a log at Flat Rock Creek in the grounds of the Cloister.  Winter is holding on.  Snow is in the forecast for tomorrow.

Feb. 21:  Ice mushrooms?  Puzzle this one out!

May 3rd:  First Rattler of the season.  An 11-segment rattle on this big guy.

Life and Legacy: The numbering of my days

I have an announcement to make.  I am dying.

I just got back from the doctor's office and the news was ... well ... unexpected.

My blood cholesterol levels are a little high.  According to the American College of Cardiology on-line risk assessment test, I have a 10.9 percent chance of dying of ASCVD (atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease) in the next ten years.  Worse, according to the Social Security Actuarial Life Table, I have a 50-50 chance of being dead in fifteen years.

Okay, so maybe my announcement was a bit overdramatic.

But  it's undeniable that my days are numbered.  I'm well past the milestone of having lived 25,000 days (about age 68½).  I'm bearing down on the biblical three score and ten.  And according to the tradition of the distant future culture in my 'Eden's Womb' novel series, I've completed the fourth and last of the seventeen-year life stages (Child, Hunter, Guide, Sage), at which time I am considered an 'Ancestor' even if I'm still clinging to life.

I will be lucky to live another 5000 days, and indeed, even if I live that long, I can't expect to be very productive.  I can hope, but the statistics paint a bleak picture.

So here's my real announcement:  As far as this blog is concerned, today is Day One of 5000 and no more.  On Wednesday, October 22, 2031, Lord willin' and the crick don't rise, I will write my last post; and this blog will become a reference source, my long-winded 'Epitaph', my Legacy to the world. 

An old African proverb says that when a man dies a library burns to the ground.  By Day 5000, I hope to have filled this library with most of the stuff from my life that is worth preserving.  Thus the new topic label 'Life and Legacy'.

I chose today to begin this numbering of my days for several reasons, but perhaps the most meaningful is that it is a distinctive holiday.  It is Darwin Day - the day that commemorates the birth of the man who taught us that all life is descended from a single ancient ancestor.

Deep Ancestry and family connections (Genealogy) are themes I'll be exploring much more in coming posts.  Turns out that Charles Darwin is a 9th Cousin, six generations removed.  Today is also Abraham Lincoln's birthday.  I was surprised to discover that Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day, February 12th, 1809, one in Kentucky and the other in England.  Although I can't find a family link to Lincoln, we do have family blood-line connections to six or seven other US Presidents including George Washington, whose birthday comes in ten days.

Yes, I am dying.  It's only common sense to face reality square-on.  But this prospect does not cause me despair.  I look forward to the 5000 days ahead.  And best of all, I have found true immortality.  Not in the words I leave behind here, not in the teachings of the faith-traditions, but in the words of a much greater book.  To find out just what I mean by this, you'll have to wait another day or two ...

Northwest Territories and back - a Christmas Story

December 27, 1969 - We stopped at Niagara falls on our way home.

This is the fourth and final installment remembering my 1969 Bucket List drive to northern Canada in the dead of winter.  In the last report we had left the Arctic and done a driving tour of the Canadian Rockies through Jasper and Banff.  Now we faced the long drive home to Pennsylvania.  Four days of steady progress across the Canadian Prairies brought us to the north shore of Lake Superior.

The day before, Christmas Day, we spent driving across western Ontario.  It was to be just another travel day--no special plans.  I was going to celebrate Christmas with family a few days later.  But this Christmas Day turned out to be the most memorable, and most meaningful, of all my sixty-eight Christmases.

The reason?  I got to give to strangers in need--selflessly and without pre-planning--a gift that was desperately needed.

We were driving down an icy, curvy highway after an overnight snow.  About the middle of the morning we came around a curve and saw a small maroon sedan turned on its side in the ditch on a slick downhill curve.  A distraught young man and his wife were climbing out of the drivers side door, and the man gave us a desperate wave.

It wasn't needed of course.  We pulled over and quickly learned that neither of them were hurt beyond a few bruises--just badly rattled.

I remembered having passed a town with a closed gas station a few miles back.  Maybe we could find someone around who could help.  The young man (actually older than me by a couple years) came with me, and my roommate stayed with the young woman and the overturned car.

At the town, we knocked on the door of the house closest to the gas station, and the gentleman who answered the door did not hesitate.  Soon he was following us back to the accident scene in his pickup truck with a tow chain thrown in the back.

When we arrived at the overturned car, we found that another driver had stopped and he and my roommate were trying to right the car by rocking it back and forth.  With the three of us who had just arrived adding our muscle to the task, we did manage to get the car back on its wheels.  The young man tried the starter and his car started right up!  It had just a few cosmetic dents and dings.  With the tow chain, the gas station guy easily yanked the car out of the ditch and back onto the road.  He wouldn't think of taking any compensation for his help.  The young man and his wife were on their way to a family Christmas celebration in the city of Kenora, but he pulled out one of his wrapped Christmas gifts--a bottle of some sort of liquor--and offered it to me as a thank-you.  I told him to keep it.  The warm-fuzzy feeling of having given a small gift of help when help was needed was more than enough.

We all said our farewells and headed on our way.

And for the rest of that day the cold gray surroundings somehow felt warm and bright.  The glow came from inside.

* * *

Two days later we crossed into the US at Niagara Falls.  The ample freezing spray from Horseshoe Falls had deposited a thick coat of ice on everything.

The adjacent lawn was like an ice skating rink.  That's Rainbow Bridge in the background.

The next day I dropped Bob at his home in Reynoldsville, PA and stopped in briefly at Penn State before reaching my parents' home in SE Pennsylvania.

We had only a few days at home before resuming classes at Penn State.  After spending three weeks in below zero weather, the State College winter seemed mild by comparison.  We got a snowfall a few days into the new Semester and my friends and I undertook an overnight project to build a snow monument that would be truly interactive--something that people would not be able to ignore.

Just a few days later, waking up early and gazing out the window of my room on the sixth floor of Shunk Hall, I was met with this spectacular sun pillar beside the iconic Nittany Mountain.

Somehow the glow seemed a celestial reflection of that feeling I had experienced a couple weeks before, on Christmas Day in the snowy wilds of western Ontario.

Arctic Winter Drive - Road's end at Yellowknife, NWT

Midday sun over Great Slave Lake, December 19, 1969, taken from the Bush Pilot's memorial, Yellowknife.

This is part three of four in the series remembering my first epic Bucket List trip - a college Christmas-break drive north to the Canadian Arctic.  At the time (December 1969), the only all-weather highway to reach Canada's Northwest Territories went to its capital of Yellowknife and ended there.  The highway opened in 1960, and getting to the end of that road had been on my bucket list for a long time.

I'll continue with the report of the 1969 trip in a moment.  But first I want to digress briefly to explain why I'm revisiting that trip at this particular time.

You see, Northwest Territories now has a second access road called the Dempster Highway.  Since it opened in 1979, it too has been calling my name.  Now the NTW government has seriously ramped up the volume of that Siren-song.  With the November 15, 2017 opening of the extension to Tuktoyaktuk, this route provides the first and only North American public road access to the Arctic Ocean.  I want to go there.  Actually, I'd like to walk there.  But that's a subject for another post.  For now, let's return to 1969.

In my last report, my roommate and I had crossed the Mackenzie River on an ice road, passing an oil tanker truck that had nearly broken through the ice and sunk to the bottom.  The next morning dawned clear and chilly - minus 12F - and my car wouldn't start.  We had to find somebody to give us a rolling tow, and he charged us $5 for the service.  Finally we were on the road and headed east along the north side of Great Slave Lake.  Here's a view of the lake in the distance as we descend toward it.

We passed this scenic lake-front rest area,

and were in town by mid-afternoon.  We checked in to the infamous Gold Range Hotel, still an iconic destination today.  Here I found some of the frontier flavor I was seeking.  The hotel didn't really have a lobby.  You checked in at the bar on the ground floor.  As we arrived there was a loud argument taking place, nearly coming to blows, between a First Nations local and a French Canadian construction worker.  Seems one of them had burned the mattress in the worker's room, and the clerk/bartender was insisting that somebody had to pay for it.  Coming in the door right after us was one of Canada's finest - a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer.  The tension in the room quickly faded, and the clerk/bartender turned her attention to us.  I don't know who paid for the mattress, but as the old saying about the RCMP goes, "they always get their man."

I wasn't about to have a repeat of the morning's car-starting problem so once we had the keys to our room I took the battery out of my car and brought it in.  I also drained the oil out of the car because it was time for an oil change.

The next day was our day to tour the town.  We headed out on foot at about 10AM in balmy near-zero temperatures.  It was an extremely rare sunny day.  Weather statistics for December in Yellowknife show that for the entire month the town averages no more than 24 hours of sunshine.  Let me emphasize that.  Twenty four hours of sunshine for the *entire month*.  We got four or five of those as we trekked around that day.

We headed for a high-point in the old part of town where there is a little park and a plaque honoring the bush pilots of the region.  There I shot the headline photo up top, and several others.  Here's the look northeast toward Latham Island and the old part of town. 

This view is in the opposite direction, back toward what's called the new town, which can be seen on the horizon in the distance.  The second photo shows a comparison shot between 1969 and today. 

When we visited Yellowknife in 1969, it was a gold mining town and had only recently been named the capital of the Territories.  Population had swelled from around 2000 to 6000.  Gold mining was on the wane by the 1980's, and the town was only thriving because of the government jobs.  But with the discovery of diamonds in 1991, the boom returned, and today the town has nearly 20,000 citizens.

The next day we headed out.  I filled the engine with fresh, warm oil and connected the warm battery and the car started on the first crank.  That day we drove 600 miles on snow covered dirt roads.  When it's that cold the snow isn't slippery.  Driving fifty miles per hour is no big deal.

The next day there was more driving on dirt roads.

This was simply called the 'Forestry Trunk Road' and it made the connection through 100 miles or more of unpopulated territory to the town of Hinton in the foothills of the northern Canadian Rockies.  This was a tough day.  Soon after the photo of the road above it began to snow and accumulated up to six inches.  We were seriously out in the middle of nowhere, nobody was going to plow the road.  Snow was coming down heavily enough that the road was hard to see, and my windshield wipers kept fouling.  I can still feel the stress and tension fifty years later when I recall this drive. 

But finally we were out of the Arctic and back to civilization -- the Canadian Rockies at Jasper and headed south toward Banff.  It was pretty country, even in the bleak, cloudy heart of winter.

Athabasca Falls

Sunwapta Canyon

The aptly named Goat Range

Next time:  Heading home, spending Christmas Day on the road.  It was, and still is, the most memorable Christmas of my life.