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Another long weekend, another adventure. Sep. 30 is Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada, in recognition of our indigenous peoples' struggles during our past colonial period. I invited cmknight and his lovely wife Sharon to join my daughter Andrea and I on a day trip into the Hunter Creek watershed, on the south side of the Fraser River near Hope. They had never been there before, so I hoped to find a spot for Sharon to hunt mushrooms, one of her hobbies. It was a nice mild fall day, mostly sunny until late afternoon, when some grey overcast rolled in from the ocean. After a few failed attempts to find the right turnoff, as I hadn't been there in a few years, I got my Gaia maps pulled up on the carplay screen, and we got to the right starting point. The road is very steep and loose gravel/rocks, so we shifted our rigs into low range, and kept them that way till we returned to pavement in the late afternoon. We explored all of the branches of the old road system, to the limits that our trucks would allow. The first branch, up the West Fork, was uneventful, ending at a small hydro dam and a view of the snow covered ridge to our west. The next branch, off the West Fork up a ridge to the south, was steep and loose, with some mild cross ditching, but blocked by a recent rockfall before the end, forcing a twelve point turnaround to get back down. Sharon found a few young puffball mushrooms along here, edible, but nothing to get excited about. Back down at the mainline trail we found a nice wide area to haul out the camp chairs and have some lunch, while Sharon scaled a steep bank to get into the pines above to hunt Chantrelles, but with no success. After snacks, we continued along the old mainline, which again rises steeply from the creek, up the ridge on the east side. We eventually reached the end of this route, where it became too narrow and overgrown to continue, so another multi-point turn around got us going back down, after a pause for some photos of the views of the peaks to the s/w and the West Fork valley, now far below. We tried one more branch off this road on the descent, heading up another ridge to the south, but cm, with a bit less clearance under his longer wheelbase Ram, was crunching his step bars in the deeper cross ditching, so we called it a day, and slowly worked our way back down the mountain to pavement, reaching there about 5PM. Although we saw no large wildlife, no tracks, and only a few old bear scat piles, we had a very nice day out there, and headed home happy.

My son’s steel head today! Clear water river Idaho.

I got out for the day with my daughter and some of the local sasquatch crew today. MagniAesir, Thomas, alohacop and his wife convoyed down to the Canadian end of Ross Lake, where we found the lake level so low that there's no water at all on the Canadian side of the border; you'd have to drag your boat about a km across weeds and logs on the US side to reach the actual lake right now. We turned back north to an old standby rough campsite that we've used in the past, and spent the afternoon in our camp chairs in the sunshine, shooting the breeze for a few hours before heading home. We saw a fair number of grouse, fishermen on the Skagit, and mushroom pickers, but that was it for excitement. Still, it was my first outing in months, after a couple of medical adventures/hospital stays, so I was delighted to just make it out there! In the first 2 photos, I'm standing on the International Boundary, looking south.