I spent a few days around new years skiing into around and back from the shelter at the top of the Phelix Creek drainage. I don’t think I could do justice to the trip by writing about it, and if I did it would be too long an installment to be readable.

I also didn’t get any pictures, since I don’t have a camera. Some other people took some pictures but I doubt I’ll see them, and I don’t remember anyone taking shots of the things that really moved me anyway. So the experience may have to go unrecorded except in my unreliable memory. Life is like that I guess.

Too bad there is no way to effectivley share though. At one point, cold though it was, I turned and caught the view over our up-track and with no warning almost started crying. Yep, I almost cried. Later, at the top of Mt. Aragorn, I stood and looked at the view of the mountains on the coast side and did it: I starting balling like a little girl. Yup, I actually cried. Then the wind picked up and it all froze to my face. Life is like that too I guess.

And that’s just the skiing (I pulled telemark turns down the sunny side of a virgin-powder-filled slope by the way. Not good ones god knows, terrible terrible ones, but *I* telemark skiied the side of a mountain.) The scene at the hut will stick with me. I wish more of my friends were around these days, but I seem to have stumbled into a good group of other people’s friends for now. And they do some really cool things.