I need some air that no-one's been breathing

I seriously don't know where the time goes anymore. I went on a hike last weekend, and meant to post about it before now, but better late than never I guess.

It all started when I posted one of the pictures from the drive I went with on my brother on Facebook. One of my old high school friends commented on how gorgeous it was, and then said that the next thing I needed to do was meet her and her husband for a hike the next morning. I haven't seen either of them since high school, but it was a hike I'd been wanting to do all summer long, but thought there would still be too much snow to make it up that high. There was still snow, but she said they'd heard it was passable, so I joined them. It wasn't a hard decision to make. I'm really glad I went. It was nice catching up with the two of them, and the scenery was simply phenomenal. Here are some of the pics I took.

It's been a relatively cool summer, so there were still plenty of wildflowers:



As expected, we did have to cross a few snow fields:



The view from the other side of the first snow field wasn't too shabby:



And it just kept on getting better. This is my favorite picture from the hike:



Here are some hikers and their dog that were crossing another snow field in front of us:



The scariest part for me was that I'd lost my sunglasses, and was worried about getting snow blindness. I had to squint my eyes as much as possible while walking across the snow so as not to burn my retinas. I think I did sunburn my eyelids, even though I'd applied sunblock, but better the outside of those than the eyes themselves. Luckily, everything turned out fine.

We eventually came up along a ridge just before making our final ascent to the summit. The view was pretty good on both sides of the trail:





The summit was pretty cool too:





But perhaps the funnest part of the entire hike was when we were crossing one of the steep snow fields, and decided to follow someone else's slide rather than walk back down. Here's a picture that shows you how steep the slope was:



And here's one of the slide itself:



We also saw a commode that has a view that rivals any:



No, I didn't use it.

At some point during our ascent, my friend told me that I hadn't changed a bit since high school. She added that she was glad that it wasn't weird hanging out again after all this time.

"Really? I think I've changed a lot since high school."

"Yeah?" she asked, "How so?"

I answered, "I'm way more cool now than I ever was back then."

All in all, it was a good day!