Day 41-Do Our Own Thing

The day before we walked through this valley and camped just before the climb back to the trail and the exposed ridge.  

We're almost back to the trail and the hiking, even with numb feet, is almost kind of nice--if you're willing to forget the side-hilling on 70 degree slopes with nothing but an endless snow shoot below--its hard to forget something like that.  

Instead of more side-hilling Portrait and I summit a peak instead of following the trail around it. 

We reach what we thought was the summit (it wasn't, but the view was wonderful and the climb the rest of the way up was nice enough).  We walked along a snow free ridge and even saw foot prints up there (most likely Highlife's tracks).  The descent back to the trail involved Portrait kicking snow steps for 20 minutes with the snow shoes on his hands (they have crampons on the front to aid in traction) to help him cling to the steep slope and me following in his steps.  When he was exhausted from kicking steps and we were past the steepest of the slope we carefully turned our backs on the slope and glissade down one after the other--it was fun, surprisingly.  We did a bit more glissading and slowly picked our way off the trail--we'd had enough.  It was time to do our own thing to get to Pagosa Springs...which was still many days away.