A Birthday Hike for Bobbie

“If a doctor treats your cold, it will go away in fourteen days. If you leave it alone, it will go away in two weeks."

Well maybe not this particular strain, as it's putting normally young and healthy people in the hospital with pneumonia. 

Back in my working-for-the-man days, the ideal "cold" was one that was disagreeable enough to call in sick to work, but not so severe that you couldn't go out and play.

Though a few tentacles from our colds resist defeat, both Bobbie and I have been feeling healthy enough to get out doors again. Since it was her birthday, Caleb and I let her choose the day's adventure—a Red Mountain snow-hike up to Yankee Girl Mine, which pushes 11,000 feet. I'm still coughing up yellow balls of phlegm, so this will either cure me or kill me.

We couldn't have asked for a better day... sunny, warm, windless, and over a foot of fresh snow to wade.This doesn't account for "drifts," however, so there were times when my knees got a little cold...

We post-holed through some pretty deep drifts trying to access an olden house (see above photo). It's likely built on mine tailings, perched on a hillside with dramatic views West and North. Sections of the Hayden massif are visible, along with a ridge line that Bobbie and I were forced to bail from only this past summer when it suddenly turned knife-edged and "airy." 

We took a moment to share that and other memories of past misadventures. Like the tumble-down mine shack, we all reach a point when our best years lie behind us. Though it went unspoken, our greatest collective dread is that, eventually, we'll have to start reining in aimless high country treks...stay "in bounds," color inside the lines. Life is a crapshoot. We've been fortunate. No regrets. But I want more. If that old mine shack can still endure winters at 11,000 feet, maybe we can to. 

Yankee Girl is such a photogenic head-frame during winter. We met only one other soul all day long, Gary, our live-in caretaker when we are off exploring Utah and Arizona. It's difficult to imagine the hustle and bustle of mining "heydays," thousands of men working the mines, their wives and children huddled in hovels, feeding the wood stove. It took grit to live at such a brutal elevation; some had no choice. You wanna eat, you gotta work.

Happy Birthday, my love. I think we've got a few more misadventures left in us before they lock us up in "the home." :)