Gold in Them There Hills

At around 5pm, we finally made it to Darkhorse Lake. Later that night—after we all did our jobs building the fire for cooking dinner, helping with dinner, setting up tents—I went up to Layla to say hi again. “Do you know we are 8,686 feet above sea level here?” was my opening line. Geeeeezzz. Super geek again. I don’t know what was wrong with me. Anyway, I just went on about how cool it would be to see the Continental Divide—that we were so close to seeing it, etc. When I finally stopped babbling for a moment, Layla said, “Yeah it would be cool to see the Divide. Let’s go see it at sunrise tomorrow. Wanna?”

“Sure,” I said, surprising even myself. “I am not going to get any sleep in this freezing weather anyway.” The entire snow camping thing brought the concept of roughing it to a whole new level. We had all kinds of gear, but it was still really cold. Layla and I agreed that we would pretend to go to sleep. Then, we would meet a little after midnight to start our hike to the Divide.

A few hours later, I felt someone poking me. Layla had come into the boys’ tent to wake me up because my pretend sleep had turned into serious deep sleep. When I got outside the tent, I pulled out a mess tin that I had taken from dinner. “New idea: I think we can pan for gold with this.”

Layla laughed. “So, you’d rather do that than see the Continental Divide?”