Rocky Mountains - overlook

These are views that you never see in Australia. We don’t do altitude and glaciated peaks. We do erosion and salinated flats. Notice the cavities that have been eaten into the peaks, and the weirdly isolated valleys within valleys. Those are all remnants of the delinquent glaciers that carved their initials onto the mountains. There’s still ice hanging around in some of the hollows, as well as a number of tiny lakes of trapped ice-melt.

You can see in this image where the treeline ends and the true tundra alpine begins. The climate here is extremely harsh. Fierce winds dry out the surface, it is bitterly cold, the soil is thin and intense ultraviolet light beats down on everything. Alpine winters are long, with average temperatures below freezing for nearly 8 months. The growing season for the tiny tundra vegetation is so short that it can take years to recover from a single human footprint. Walking in this fragile, high altitude, ecosystem is restricted to marked paths, from which I did not stray.


Yet even on this hard, infertile rock wall, life somehow goes on. I was mentally cheering for this little guy’s big effort to eek out an existence. I would have liked to give him some encouragement, but I wasn’t sure what would be in his best interests. I settled for a little salute and went on my way.


This particular point of the journey also has the distinction of hosting the highest altitude loo (restroom) break I’ve ever taken. Altitude appears not to affect this particular bodily function, although it did have some discernible influence on my respiratory system.