by KirkB » Fri Apr 26, 2013 9:01 am
After making my last post, I apparently forgot to check the box requesting to be notified when someone replied. Not hearing anything, I was content instead to use the time to get caught up on other tasks abandoned during the two months just past. Some nagging thought, however, made me sign on late yesterday. And to my great amaze there were two new postings and a proposed solution!
At first I was skeptical, thinking that these unrecognizable images had perhaps been posted to the wrong topic. After firing up National Geographic TOPO!, however, and looking for the peaks & valleys mentioned...seeing the ridgeline & the small lake in just the right spot, the upper hillsides curving ever so slightly to the left, the long straight valley below with its curious trail/4WD road along one rim, the vague hint of a lake far below (just like the "close-up" image I'd posted so long before)...then it was I knew, without a shred of doubt, that the last major landscape had at long last been identified...that Sean's & now my quest had both been fulfilled (BTW: the "Pike's Peak-like" massif I sensed in the background...was none other than Longs & Meeker).
I truly don't know how I feel...one minute I'm elated & content...the next deeply sad & lost. In the end, however, what I feel most is...appreciative for the help & enthusiasm of the members of this forum (in particular: John Kirk, mikeofferman, lukePlumley, KentonB & ChrisRoberts) who took it upon themselves to help me solve this immense problem. To you all I express my heartfelt thanks.
As for me, I haven't set foot on a peak since I broke my back in a fall over a decade ago. Since then, I have had to content myself with memories garnered from before my injury, augmented every once-in-awhile by the few, very precious but also necessarily short & gently paced hikes I can manage each year up to the base of my beloved mountains. The rest I have to get vicariously from pictures posted on this forum or via Google Earth from my distant perch here in Kansas from where, once again, I am able to peer down into the nests of eagles.
Meanwhile, my old hiking companion, Sean, six years my senior, managed to pull off three major trips in one season (as I mentioned he would have turned 69 on the 16th of this month): a truly extraordinary man who, like his father and grandfather before him, was tragically cut down by an aneurysm long before his prime (his only complaint was of unexpected headaches his first month back).
I follow with two Google Earth images, the first from the saddle, depicting "Ridge-Valley (overview)," and the second, from lower down the valley, "Ridge-Valley (close-up)." And then, being somewhat unwilling yet to relinquish this adventure, I will close with one last image which I rediscovered as I was cleaning up my hard drive, one which, at the time, I felt was too indistinct to identify...but also one that intrigued me none-the-less for its stark beauty. It's of a shattered peak face, intimate in its detail, almost too impossibly fragile to be real. But real it is and it lies somewhere up there in the clouds as I write.
Once again, thanks for all the help and, by proxy, encouragement that members of this forum have given me along this evocative journey.
KirkB
- Attachments
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- Ridge-Valley (overview)
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- Ridge-Valley (close-up)
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- Shattered Peak Face