One day my phone rang and my granddaughter, Chelsea Turner, was on the line inviting me for tea. I had an interesting project in my workshop that was hard to tear myself away from but guessed I could take a break about three o’clock. When I arrived at the Turner house, Chelsea and her brother, Logan, had a big old map spread out on the dining room table and there were two heads in the way of my seeing anything. Oh well, it was tea I came for, wasn’t it? We exchanged greetings and it was soon clear that big plans were in the making, as “coulds” and “maybes” buzzed around like bees around a honey tree. Look, Grampa, Logan indicated a place on the map with his finger, if we climbed to the top of this mountain, we could follow it along for miles, just like we were on top of the world.” Today’s kids are supposed to see distance in Kilometres not miles. Obviously he had been listening too closely to someone’s grandfather.
“Oh, Grandpa” they both implored, ”Let’s take a hiking trip, a really long one. The weather’s good now and we could be in the alpine every day once we got on top of the mountain. We could go away over to here.” a finger on the map pointing out the place where a deep canyon cut across the “easy going.” Their enthusiasm was catching. It did look interesting and soon the exploration fever had me hooked. I reckoned we would need four pack goats to carry all our supplies and camping gear. The Turners had five so we would take them all. I would just finish the project I was working on and, when we felt the time was right, we would set out. In the meantime they could be getting the things together they would like to take. I reminded them that the lighter the packs the easier we would travel.
One sunny morning the mountains beckoned and my son-in-law trucked us with all our gear and five Alpine goats to the foot of the chosen route where we made our start. The mountain side was steep and a long way to the top. Though the two young hikers wanted to push on, Grandpa’s legs said, “Take it easy, we’ve lots of time. Never push hard on the first day out.”
About half way to the top we found a little spring bubbling out of the mountain side and enough flat ground to set our tents on. Here we made our first camp. We cleared back the debris from our fire area and Logan started supper while Chelsea and I set up the tents. The view was spectacular, we could look away out over the valley below. Soon the stars were twinkling over head and, after eating our super and tying the goats for the night we tucked into our sleeping bags.
