Updated:The photos are in the gallery, just click on the camera icon below the map or wander over to the gallery and navigate through the albums…
You know how you can be in one place and it can look just like somewhere else entirely (e.g. almost any high street in any mid size British town), well the trail we walked yesterday reminded us of our trips to Lake Garda in Italy – blazing sun, bleached gravel roads and meadows all around.
We decided to go out for a trek to look for waterfalls and rapids on the Elk River over near Elko. After parking up, the path took us along the top of the Elk River Gorge where the white water rafting companies routinely scare the bejeesus out of their paying guests. The rapids start at the dam and carry on for miles, twisting and turning as they churn the river bed with a thundering roar. The shale walls of the gorge rise like multicoloured towerblocks with only the trees giving a sense of scale. Unfortunately because of the shale, the sides of the gorge are quite unstable, further down the walls are made of what appears to be sand or dust, with little pretence of being stone. Consequently the walls here regularly give up their mass and look like Carol Smilie has been round buffing the place up. The thin veneer of trees and plants at the top live a precarious lives with the only certainty of the ones on the edge being that they will eventually have the soil washed out from them and they will eventually plummet down into the river.
Around us up at the top of the gorge spring is definitely here. There are flower meadows that Heidi* would have been proud of, and lambs played by the side of the road while the rest of the herd looked on. Butterflies crossed our paths as did different of birds almost the entire length of the route.
Our destination, shown in the second picture, allowed us to come down from the top of the gorge so that we could sit with our aching feet in the river. I took a few photos (justifying the 3kg pack on my back!), and Cath dozed in the afternoon sun.
*hmm, some of you who didn’t watch kids tv in the ’70s might want to look that up.
Looks fab and sounds wonderful. Have a great week and remember those of us back in rainy old England
Not Ben but Mum I read Heidi in the 50′s (Now I do feel old)x
I hear it’s been raining a fair bit! We had brief but vigorous showers on Sunday – pavement denting ones, but it’s supposed to be hot and sunny for the rest of the week – yaay! We’re away to Surveyor’s Lake tomorrow, so I’ll be humping gear around again :S
ooh! Canadian flag!
rain – what rain (only monsoon type rain!!)
monsoon rain, i have been having monsoon rain, it has only been spitting where you are!
ooo a german flag. that is cool
Yo Ben, thought you were in Thailand!
so did i !!!