"Let's just walk a little bit further up the trail and see what it's like," I suggested, and we did. We got up to the foot of the falls, where the water was being pulverized by the 320-foot drop with such force that is created 10mph winds. We all basked in the mist from the falls, gazing back down the creek bed we came up.
Once we were done gazing at Comet Falls, we gazed in horror at the trail leading up the mountain. It was rough, and even more vertical than what we had already hiked. "Let's just walk a little bit further up the trail and see what it's like," I suggested, and so we did. It really sucked. It took all of about 5 minutes of hiking before I felt just like I had before we stopped for lunch. We got up to a bend in the trail and took a quick breather. Then we took a few more steps to see what the trail was like ahead.
It was rough, and even more vertical than what we had already hiked. "Let's just walk a little bit further up the trail and see what it's like," I suggested, and so we did. It really sucked. It took all of about 5 minutes of hiking before I felt just like I had before we stopped for the last breather. We got up to a bend in the trail and took another quick breather. Then we took a few more steps to see what the trail was like ahead. It was rough, and even more vertical than what we had already hiked. I used some colorful language (not for the first time that day).
"I read an article in my National Geographic just the other day," I said, ignoring the part where everybody started rolling their eyes, "about flocks and herds and hives, and about how they make the right decisions about what to do. I think that we should vote every time we come to a bend and see what the trail is like about whether we want to keep going or turn back."
Everyone agreed, and we voted. It was a tie, which I said meant that we should keep doing what we were doing before, continuing up the trail. So we did. Step over step, step over step, we went up the trail. We kept coming to bends in the trail, it kept sucking, we kept voting, we kept hiking. Eventually, we came to the start of what the guidebook we had been using described as a set of "exhausting stairs."
We voted. We continued. The boy started pitching fits. i carried him for awhile, until I realized that I couldn't anymore. then he decided that he was going to "win." He started zipping up the trail like it was nothing. We stopped voting at some point, and just kept picking 'em up and putting 'em down. The girl and the boy remained enthusiastic about reaching the end of the trail. I kept looking up at the trail and wondering if we were making a bad mistake.
Eventually, I looked up and saw some people coming down. We met up with them at a bend in the trail and the told us that we had about half a mile to go (and that it was straight up), and that we should go to the sign at the end of the trail, because that's where the payoff really was. I was horrified that we had half a mile left, but inspired by a positive report about the end result. We slogged on. We were already above the top of Comet Falls. We had climbed more than 300 feet in half a mile, and the next half a mile would climb 400 feet.
It's hard to say anything about that last half a mile, except that we did it. At one point the stairs became something to climb up more than something to step up. we came out into an alpine meadow and kept walking up the trail. We came to the sign marking the end of the trail, walked a bit further, and were greeted with this view:
You could feel the cold air blowing off the glaciers. You could see the glacier melt falling in a cascade and running down to where it became Comet Falls. The kids played briefly in a small snowfield. We had climbed 2100 feet over a distance of 3 miles. We were all ver tired and had less than a liter of water left for the descent. Oh, crap! The descent!
Now we had to get down.
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