We continued our end-of-summer alpine hiking tradition as best we could this year. Instead of four or three of us female members of the family, we only had two of us. Sophie spent the summer train-hopping, road-tripping to the States, launching rockets and doing military training, so she hasn’t been home. Erin spent the summer on a Tanglewood fellowship, and anyway stuck in the US anyway because of a Canadian lost passport and a stalled replacement due to a USPS Fail. (And Noah, who, female traditions notwithstanding, would have been welcome if he was around and interested, was interviewing for jobs in Vancouver.)

Fiona was working at a local café. She had three days off a week technically, but banked and batched them as best she could in order to (a) work as an assistant dance teacher for a week (b) attend SVI as an advanced chamber student for another week and (c) be a companion and support to our refugee mom as she went through a very challenging end-of-pregnancy with a complicated out-of-town delivery. And then, we needed to make a trip to the Okanagan to get new pointe shoes fitted and to buy house stain. And all that left us with exactly two days at the very end of the summer break in which to squeeze our hike. But squeeze we did.

We put the little Subaru Crosstrek through its paces. It probably should not have been taken where we took it, but once we had our destination dialed in we were not keen to turn back. After about 90 minutes we reached the trailhead. We parked, wrapped the obligatory chicken wire around the car to prevent porcupines from gnawing on brake-lines, and started up the trail. As we got close to the ridge beside Gimli Peak, the lookover into Mulvey Basin, we spied a couple of mountain goats looking curiously at us. We spent close to an hour with them. They actually followed us, and came very close. I had only my phone for photos, and most of these, including the closest shots, are not zoomed in. They came almost within arms reach. It was truly a magical experience.