Day 5

The word of the day was RAIN.  It has rained all day and rained hard.  The little stream near the house where I am staying is swelling.  I decided today would be a good day to get some writing done.  So I spent most of the morning working on my book.  I was able to finish chapter two and come up with some good ideas for chapter 3.  I am posting the finished chapters on a website associated with the Windows Live family of internet services called Skydrive.  I will let you know how you can get to them when I figure it out.  I ate and then decided to go out and brave the rain and see what I could find.  I took a drive up a near by road called Crow Creek Road.  There is an old mine up there that I thought might be interesting.  It was a very bad road with lots of pot holes but I could see that there were a lot of trails that went off of the road.  One trail was relatively short (about 1.8 miles) and had a hand tram that crossed a gorge.  I thought that might make for some good pictures so I braved a fairly heavy rain and took off down the trail.  The trail was muddy, exeedingly so in some places but others had made their way before me and found ways around the worst of it.  I slipped and slid down to the edge of the gorge where I could hear the roaring of water below.  I made my way down the trail to the tram.  Once there I saw the first and only people I saw on the trail the whole time.  Three adventurous young people had jogged down from the other side of the gorge to try the tram as well.  After they finished I had my time.  The tram carriage was a steel mesh cage suspended from a heavy cable that stretched between two terminals.  A heavy rope was stretched between the terminals as well and looped around a series of pulleys so that one length went high over the carrier and one lower one passed right through the carriage.  You moved between the two terminals by pulling the rope which moved the carriage in the direction you were pulling.  The pull was heavy and I admit having to take several breaks - mostly on the way back - to catch my breath and rest my aching muscles (yes, I said aching not aging!).  After taking some pictures from high above the raging, rain swollen stream below, I returned the tram and and made my way along the muddy trail (uphill this time) back to the car.  I drove part of the way toward the Portage Glacier but realizing that the rain was getting worse and visibility was near zero, I decided to turn around and call it a night.  Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day for weather and pictures.  Maybe I'll catch a fish?  I plan to finish another chapter tomorrow as well.  Check back then!