Hiking Trail to Herbert Glacier

The weather here has been spectacular! Sunny and 60-70 degrees every day. The snow is melting fast. It is about 35-45 degrees at night and one night there was a fresh coating of snow on the mountains - it was cool because the snow only came to about a 1/3 of the way down the trees from treeline and below that elevation it did not snow - so there was a band of white trees. Hard to describe.

Today Sadie, Dave (a guy I work with) & I planned to hike to Herbert Glacier, which is up near Eagle River. There was a lot of snow on the trail and it made it too hard for walking. There were places where the snow was still easily a foot deep. We stopped and played along Herbert River before giving up and heading back. It's definitely a different feeling walking in the woods here versus NY for two main reasons: In NY it is hard to get lost - there is usually some kind of road within an hour or two in any direction. Here you can easily walk for hundreds of miles, some places close to many hundreds of miles, and not hit civilization of any kind. So I rarely had a fear of getting lost in NY - but here, I think I will try to always stay on the marked National Forest Trails and get into the habit of carrying minimal safety stuff - like coat, matches, compass. The second big difference is BEARS. Again, in NY I was never afraid of the woods, or cautious, but here there are so many brown and black bears and so many warning signs that it is a little nerve wracking walking in the woods. There are suggestions on how to avoid problems with bears - like make noise when walking and don't run away from a bear. But I really want to see a bear! Dave & Sadie were making all kinds of noise and I was trying to be quiet. No bear yet though! There is some bird makes a funny buzzing sound in the woods - I have yet to figure it out but I hear it a lot. I think I'll start keeping separate posts here to track the birds I'm seeing.

Oh, and Dean, you warned me about Devil's Club - the winter stalks are not nice - I accidently grabbed one when I lost my footing in the snow - Ouch!!! That will not happen again. They are all over!