Looking for a snow cap reflecting in a lake.. not much luck in winter. So after hiking to this place, acknowledging the inevitable, I thought, may as well wait for sunset. The sun was setting in the opposite direction but having spent all day exploring, looking for a good place for sunset, I’d run out of time so this was me for this day. It’s an incredibly beautiful place to be regardless and maybe I’d get some Astrophotography after dark.
I had a walk around the lake, got caught up in a snowball fight( you know how it is when you get hit by a stray and... oh it’s freakin on...) and ended up chatting with some college students for a while.
It surprises me when people perceive Australia to be dangerous when we have no land predators. We have some poisonous reptiles here but you have to be unlucky to end up on the wrong side of one, and spiders... they don’t want a bar of you but will let you know if you put some pressure on them.. crocs will have a crack though and it’s a little sharkie in some surf spots, cassowaries (basically a dinosaur)will put the hurt on you if you disturb them in any way.... and apparently we have yowies according to recent news but we don’t have bears, mountain lions and wolves.
The sun started to set without a cloud in the sky. With that, the temperature dropped sharply. I waited for the cloud of steam from my last breath to clear before looking around to find the surface of the lake empty. The college guys and girls were the last to leave. Thought that the emptiness made me feel the cold a little more so I pulled my hood up, pulled the bottom of my jacket down to cover any gaps and huddled up while waiting for all visible light to disappear. The moon wasn’t going to be up for another few hours so I should have a nice dark sky once the sun was long set. But then the lights of the ski field on Mount Hood came on.
I took a few shots to see how it was going to affect an astrophoto and I realised I wasn’t going to get what I was hoping for. Clouds started to form. That and the cold made me decide to call it a night. I pulled out my phone to check the time and google a place to stay for the night between here and my next destination.
When I got out of the car earlier, my phone was fully charged but now the cold had killed the battery. That was the moment I also reflected on seeing my headlamp on the dash of the car while thinking naaah... I’m definitely not going to need that.
So... walking back in darkness, the forest was pitch black but the snowy trails were white. I could follow them if I didn’t look directly at them. All I had to do was remember which way I’d come. If you’ve been there you know it’s a bit of a maze. I was focused on distance and direction when I thought I saw something dark move out of the forest onto the track up ahead of me.
If I looked directly at it I couldn’t see it but it was there in the periphery of my vision. I stop to watch it for a moment, crouched down to make my body as still as possible. It was hard to tell but it looked like it was moving toward me slowly. I thought a deer is not going to do that.. and then thought of the other things it could be.
I’d had this experience before in the jungle. My headlamp died, I could hear something stalking me so got my camera out. When it was close, with my heart in my mouth, I lit up the jungle with the flash. What I saw was incredible. I was able to catch some photos of it and live to share them.
This time I had a much more powerful off-camera flash. I was confident it would blind a night predator for a good while so, still crouching, I took it out of my camera bag, set it to 1/1 full charge, looked down in front of me so I could so see the darkness moving toward me, waited till it got a little bigger and popped off a flash.
The high pitch sound of the flash recycling felt like it pierced my brain as the snow all around me reflected the flash completely blinding me. So blinded it made me dizzy. I put a hand down in the snow to brace myself, the flash fully recycled, I heard a crunch in the snow up ahead so I stood up, covered my eyes and blasted the flash again.
I heard ‘Dude..! What the F@&$?’
I said ‘oh Shit sorry.’ He said ‘I can’t see.’
I said ‘me either. Sorry I didn’t know what you were. How come you’re walking without a torch?’ Torch? ‘Flashlight’.. He said ‘my phone died. Do you have a flashlight?’ I told him my situation and asked where he was going. He seemed to be disoriented and needed to get to the same place as me so we waited till our eyes readjust and headed back the way he came.
We made it back to our cars in a few turns while talking about the unlikeliness of being mauled to death by an animal there... but that it wasn’t impossible. I’d decided Yosemite was going to be the next stop so after saying our goodbyes and good luck, google mapped Yosemite. 11 hours? Tally-ho
