Stand Your Ground, Don't Poop Your Pants

(This is how I look standing my ground, it seems to be a pretty good way to scare off wildlife)

The other day I tried to conquer Mt. Logan again...and failed...again! However, rather than sink into despair, I've decided to focus on the cool things I saw.

I was cruising up the mountain, but stopping to take notice of the pretty flowers. I have this almost irresistible urge to pick flowers, but then my conscience kicks in and reminds me that if everyone picked flowers no one would get to enjoy them. It sucks, but I feel better about myself in the end, not having taken away from someone else's experience, and setting a good example (even if I was the only one in the canyon that day). I took lots of pictures of flowers, here's one that sort of turned out. My ultimate goal is to be able to recognize flowers, so far I can tell an Indian Paintbrush and Evening Primrose.

Then I ran into this fungal oddity. As near as I can tell, this is a fungus. It looks like a wad of toilet paper, and is a bit bigger than a softball, but it's spongy. I poked it both times I passed it and still feel like it might actually be an alien life form. I should have taken a mycology class.

Things really got exciting about an hour later when I ran into my first moose of the month. I've run into a moose outside before. It was on Causey Reservoir, a moose had parked itself in the water about 15 feet away from the beach I was kayaking to. As exciting as it was to see a moose, I was really disappointed that I wouldn't be able to chill on the beach the moose was so effectively guarding. I considered trying to kayak past it, and figured I could do it, but getting back in the water seemed kind of risky. I spent more time than I should have debating what I knew about moose behavior. I knew that females with calves would be aggressive, but I wasn't sure about the males. In the end I kayaked away, without taking a break on the best beach there. I've since learned that anything with antlers shouldn't be trusted, they have too much testosterone and the ability to gore you.

Anyways, here's the moose I saw, it's a little blurry, but that's because I decided not to sneak up on it to get a better picture.

And here it is running away. I felt kind of victorious because it was the first time I got to use my new mantra: Stand your ground, don't poop your pants. The mantra came from an "Outside Magazine" article on rodeo clowns, but I thought it was applicable in most areas of everyday living.

It was at this point that I realized I wasn't on a trail. Along the way there had been little plastic flags tied to things, but they weren't really necessary for finding the trail. Suddenly they were necessary. For the last few minutes I'd been following the path a marmot had dug under the ground, and really that's not a reliable way to get to where you want to go. Eventually I spotted a flag about 50 yards away and hiked toward it. I spent the next hour hiking through brush and trees following these plastic flags. I was really hoping they were put where they were to illuminate a trail, but toward the end of the journey it began to seem like someone was just playing a prank on me. I tried my best to avoid hiking through any place with a lot of trees, because that seemed to most likely place to run into moose. By the end of the hike I had run into moose at 4 different locations. It's possible I saw the same individual multiple times, but they don't wear distinct styles of antlers to help me distinguish individuals, so I'll never know.

In the end I ended up about 100 vertical feet short of where I thought the peak was. I hiked for as long as I could before turning back. I kept thinking that if I made it to the top I would find the easy way down (and there has to be an easy way down, there's a cell phone and fire watch tower at the top, there has to be an access road). But at 8:30 I decided since I was hiking using binoculars to find my path, I had best turn back before the sun went down. [I think that's excellent proof that I am capable of making good decisions.] Here's what I was facing, there are two flags in this picture, can you find them?

If not, here they are again.

Here's what I was hiking through most of the time. If you can find a trail through this you're amazing. I try not to be scared by much, but it really freaks me out to be hiking through waste high brush, not know what I'm stepping through.

A fun trick I learned about a year ago to tell sunset is put up your hand and measure the distance between the sun and horizon with it. For every hand distance between the sun and horizon, there's an hour between that time and sunset (ex. four hand breadths means about 4 hours until sunset), and each of your four fingers (don't add your thumb into the measuring mix) gives you about 15 minutes. So with two fingers (or 30 minutes) until sunset, I turned back. It was difficult, this is my disappointed face.

The views from up top were amazing. I like the one below in particular because it shows several mountain ranges (the nearest is the Wellsvilles, the next is the Promontory Mtns, and behind that I have no idea), Cutler Marsh, the Bear River and the Square Ponds. I love the Square Ponds, it's where Logan's waste water goes through it's primary treatment. Solids settle out and bacteria and algae digest a lot of organic materials.
Here's the view to the north, it's kind of cool to be able to see Logan Canyon from above.

On the way back down I tried trail running the dark again, and I was far more successful this time. I only tripped a couple of times, but I managed to catch myself before I ate any dirt. I also managed to get some poor-quality pictures of the nocturnal wildlife in Dry Canyon. Here's one of those creepy Common Poorwills. Note the glowing eyes, and imagine how scary it is to catch those eyes in the beam of my headlamp from several yards back. Creepy.

And here's blurry picture of the horrible spiders. Note how the eyes are big enough to gleam in the flash, those are some pretty big spiders.
I'd hate to end this epic blog on a creepy note, so here are some more pretty flowers.
Sorry for the errant bolding. It seemed like a good way to break up such a long post.