Sasquatch Love

"I wonder if I'll get raped by a Sasquatch?" I mused aloud as my nephew and I walked into the subalpine forest.

"They are supposed to smell horrible," he said.

I suspect he believes in such creatures.  I do not, but I enjoy the goofy drama of it all.

Our goal was to reach that same high point in Washington that I was trying to get to in Impending Divorce.  In mid-august, they lock the gate, so we had to walk in.  There is yet another gate that they lock in December, so any conifers that I could find up that far would be really tough to get to.  It would take five or six miles on snowshoes to get to the upper gate.  Just getting to these trees in the winter is the hardest thing.

My nephew is a smoker, so our progress toward the remote peak was significantly hampered by his hiking ability.  (Just so you know...  if you have trouble keeping up with your fat-ass uncle who is twice your age...  you might want lay off the cigarettes.)  We made it a little farther up the mountain that I did on my last try, but we didn't make it to the peak- not even close :(

No brooms or other mutants were found that day- until we came back out.

I had sort of noticed this tree on the way in, but we were in the middle of joking around about Bigfoot.  On the way out, I got a clear view of it.

It is an Engelmann spruce with a very unusual branching pattern.  It looks like an arboreal octopus, with branches coming out at odd angles.

I'm going to try hiking to it in the next few weeks, to see if I can successfully graft it in the fall.  I've heard that this works, but the percentage of successful grafts is lower.

Wish me luck!