Friday July 21, 2000

Fifteen feet above the Highline Trail I spread my watercolors on a flat rock which overhangs a tiny trickling waterfall. Few people on the trail below notice me, most look in the other direction, where a sharp drop swoops into a tree covered glacial valley and rises upbruptly in the rough granite of the Livingston Range.

It seems the perfect spot to paint, perfect, that is, until a bee hovers a foot from my face, just looking. I can ignore a bee—or two. But before long a dozen orbit me. Then the humming suddenly stops. They have landed. On me.
And my painting could still use work, but the little vibrating threats are too distracting, so I pack up hastily, shaking bees from my pack and scrambling back down the rocky ledge.

The narrow trail back to the Logan Pass hugs a cliff called the garden wall. Its blocky ancient rock contains fossil impressions of the cracked-mud gasps of long extinct seas on the rocks flat tops, and organic patterns of sea life in cross sections. I stop as if walking through a gallery--each section of the wall is like the best of abstract paintings. Paintings with enough substance that they shed layers which collect like broken pottery at their base.

As I am about to climb the last steep rise to the road, my path is block by a shaggy mountain goat who looks at me sideways from her square wise head--a curious babe prances around her. I'm grateful to get a close look at them, but nervous of the ewes horns, which up close look extremely sharp. She know who this trail belongs to, and it's not to me.

to be continued....