I'm Lichen Hikin'

I like hiking. I also like lichen (pronounced liken). Lichen grows on rocks and it looks likes gray potato chips and tastes like crunchy mushrooms. It's one of my favorite things to eat on hikes, but I didn't find any here. Maybe it's too early in the year, as the trees and wild flowers have literally just started to bloom and there was ice on lake Jenny a week ago. "Then why did you title this post that Tim?" I titled it that because we have done three days of consecutive hiking and I'm liking it, and I like puns. 

Phelps Lake

Our first full day hike of the trip was a currumnativigation of Phelps Lake, a which is a lake at the foot of the Tetons. It is about 7.5 miles around the lake and it was supposed to take four and a half hours but you know how things work, we did it in eight hours. Part of the reason that it took us so log was that we hopped off of our the trail onto a different trail that lead up through Death Canyon, what a beautiful name. Apparently it is named for a guy that went missing on a survey party and was never found, we didn't find him. Instead, we found snow! Well there is snow all over the place here so this wasn't our first rodeo with 3 foot deep snow that is perfect for making snowballs. I think I have a snowball fighting problem... I get way too into snowball fights. Maybe it's because I'm snow deprived living in the Carolina's and my New Hampshire side comes out when I'm around snow. Snow kills friendships.  Getting lost may have also contributed to why it took us so long to get back. Around this time of the year as the snow melts I guess that it common for avalanches to occur so there was downed trees and snow blocking our path. Well we were just doing a loop around the lake so when in doubt go to the lake. Too bad there was a river that fed into the lake and blocked our path once again. Dont worry we made it out. Getting lost and trying to find our way was actually really fun, it was cool to have to think about where to got rather than just coasting along, mindlessly. After we got out the professors surprised us with ice cream. It had half of my daily value of saturated fat but it was totally worth it. I did a little dance as I endulged. 

Jenny Lake

After our long day yesterday I was really starting to feel it in my fetuses (the plural of feet), but we had a hike planned for today so I had to soldier on. Jenny Lake is a much larger than Phelps Lake so there was no way that we could walk around the whole thing...and live. Before we met with the park ranger to learn about the geology of the Tetons, we were given a few minutes to mosey around the shop, visitor center, and the bathrooms. I went to the shop,nor general store as they like to call it out here. Guess what. They had hot dogs! I was watching them spin around on the cooker and I was getting so hungry. Forget the turkey sandwich that I packed, I wanted a hot dog. But every rose has its thorn, they wouldn't wine ready till 11:30. I looked at my watch, and it said 10:00. I don't have much experience with cooking, but I know that it does not take an hour and a half to cook a hot dog. I mean maybe if they were using a solar cooker, but this place was dedinitely burning fossil fuels by the giaton. I wanted to just risk it and toss one of the supposedly uncooked dogs onto a bun and toss a 5 down on the counter and walked out of the store as I smoothly told the clerk to keep the change and put on my black rayban wayfarer sunglasses that I totally don't own. But I didn't want to cause a scene and I only had 20s so the process would have been much more awkward as I would have to wait for the change. Instead I just ate half of my sandwich as I met back up with my group. We were being taught about the fault that is at the base of the mountain and is what caused the mountain to rise from the plains. There are two plates and as one goes up, where the Tetons are, the other one goes down, the plains. If you are looking from the plains side the flat land actually dips down and then rises into the Tetons. We looked at maps made of it by lydar or lidar, which is recorded by sending waves down from a plane and bounces back up, giving an x ray sort of look that is just the land without the trees. It was cool but I still don't understand it. We saw a moose with her moose kid it was really spectacular. I am way more interested in ecology than geology. I know rocks are the base for everything, but plants and animals just seem so much more relevant to me. When we got back to the general store the hot dogs were gone. I responded by buying three packs of ramen noodles, 39 cents a piece aw yeah. UPDATE: my classmates do not appreciate me eating raw packs of ramen noodles and give me this face.

Granite Canyon

Today we did not do a full day hike, but this was my favorite hike of the whole trip. I don't know what it was, maybe it was the unpublished blog post that I wrote that I vented about everything that had been annoying me, or maybe it was the beautiful blue sky. Whatever it was I had a great time. The trail followed a river that had to be a class 5. For you non white water rafters the river was flowing pretty damn hard. Every time I looked at the river I would imagine what it would be like to be in it. The force of the water looked immense as it followed down a waterfall and was pure white. No doubt about it, if you fell in you would die, either from drowning or collision against the giant rocks. Despite the negative thoughts I loved the river. The sounds created a white noise effect and the flowing water seemed to soothe my mind. The water was flowing hard because all of the snow in the Tetons is starting to melt, so the wart is freezing cold. After eating lunch, some of the girls decided that it would be fun to swim in a calmer section of the river. I think of myself as the adventurous type, but that sounded a little crazy to me. We didn't have towels and wha if we got pulled down into the more rapid part of the river? We would die. Okay maybe I'm more of pessimist... We got to the part of the steam that the girls were talking about and as it turns out, the current was too strong to go all the way in, so they went up to their knees. Kelsey even dunked her whole body in. I ain't about that life. Then Katherine slipped and almost got taken away by the current. See there is some logic in ways. I eventually got into the freezing river and dunked my head in. It was really refreshing and made me feel alive. 30 seconds later I couldn't move my feet and had to get a hand from someone to get out. Woo hoo, adventure. Later, we scaled up a gaint rock about the size of a house and observed striations on the rocks at the top. Striations are marks where the glacial rocks grinded against stationary rock as the glaciers advanced down the mountain. I just realized that I wrote a lot and I appologize for not breaking this post up into a few shorter ones. If you read all of this, then you're the bomb. Go buy yourself some ice cream or listen to Elton John (that's what I've done today) because you have read farther than I would have. 

Later skater