Backpacking The Cayoosh Mountains

Imagine yourself walking to the top of a narrow, snow-covered ridge at almost 8000 feet of elevation. Intently concentrated on your footing you manage to notice the wolverine tracks in the snow beside you and as you stop to follow them with your gaze, your eyes take you down into The Lost Valley. There in front of you it lies, never been logged and barely traveled by mankind. Several pristine tarns catch the sun's light as they sit placidly in the bowls of the glacial cirques. By this time your chin is getting a little bit cold in the snow where it has dropped along with your lower jaw.

Imagine yourself standing in a delicately vegetated meadow scooping the purest water you have ever seen from a mountain stream right where it comes out from an underground spring. As your thirst is quenched your eyes are lifted across the valley to a complete panorama of enormous peaks capped in stunningly white glaciers blaring out on the horizon. As you allow your imagination to carry you, you can almost see how they drop off on the far side into the Okanagan plain, feeding the Fraser River and it's tributaries and giving marvelous rafting adventures to Lytton thrill seekers.
A sudden eruption of colour in the cloud above the ice-capped peaks causes you to lose your train of thought. The violet, tangerine, gold and scarlet all meld together to bid the sun safe passage on its way to the other side of the horizon. After you've wiped the drool off your face, you fix yourself some dinner and as you are sitting back in the cool of the evening with a warm mug of hot chocolate in hand you rub your eyes in disbelief: the sun is rising only two hours after it set! But as you watch you see that this is not the sun but his daughter the moon. She lights the sky with such magnificence that all hope of digitally capturing her splendor is abandoned. The bloated harvest moon bathes the ridge features all around you in the most astoundingly haunting glow of silver light that you simply shiver in awe of the one who created it. You fall asleep to the face of the moon shining through the moisture vent of your tent in a heavenly beam of white light catching on the mist of your breath and shimmering brilliantly. Your dreams are dominated by the vision of a breath-taking sunrise but even the wildest of your dreams can not prepare you for what you will see coming over that distant horizon to thaw the frozen alpine and light the morning sky on fire.

I could go on but I think that I will end my experiment in literarily re-engineering what words don't suit to describe. I was just backpacking for six days just above Duffy lake and the Duffy Lake Road. Sometimes it's difficult to remember that I'm in school. I recommend having class in the Cayoosh Mountain range... you can learn a lot.