Gordie's Mountain

Yesterday Eli and I made our third ascent of Mount Benson, in the company of Ray and Gordie. We started from Witchcraft Lake. There is an extensive (relatively unmapped and sparsely marked) spiderweb of tangled trails as well as logging slashes to navigate to reach the top, but as long as you're headed up, it's no problem. Nearly all upward paths converge at the summit; although there are a few other lower viewpoint destinations as well. Coming down is trickier; the downward paths do not converge and it is considered desirable to end up at your starting place e.g. your parked car, instead of 10 km. to the south. All of the paths I've encountered so far include sections requiring some clambering and those stretches will become difficult as winter makes them slippery. Perhaps the lower viewpoints will suffice as destinations during the time of snow and ice.

At age 72, Gordie knows all the paths. He's walked this mountain frequently since a boy; perhaps that's why he remains as nimble as a mountain goat. He walks up the mountain (~ 3000 foot rise) a couple times each week and does maintenance work on selected routes. On this trip, after we reached the top, Gordie sent us on a particular downward route while he took another, so he could do some brush clearing on one of his newer trails, "Whiskers". As he disappeared, Ray turned to us and said "Did you notice that this is Gordie's mountain". We replied in the affirmative. After a bit of mixup on just which was our intermediate meeting place, the four of us reunited and made our way back to the car. Gordie showed us various interesting artifacts along the way, requiring a bit of bushwhacking.

Eli and I had driven separately, so the two pairs separated at the cars for the ten minute drive back home. Eli and I picked up a DVD movie on the way, changed into fresher clothes once home, and then went for a quick late afternoon meal at Delicado's. After that we watched our film, "Shadows of the Sun" a predictable and somewhat contrived piece that kept us reasonably amused while we ate popcorn and drank apple cider. The movie was set in Tuscany, but not one faithful to the modern time period of the film. Among the contrived scenes were the carpenters working in the town square with their hand tools (don't they have shops at home, anymore?) and the steam locomotive near the end of the film pulling equally antique railroad cars, passed off as typical rail travel in today's Italy.

Richard
2006.10.15