February 26, 2008
We spent a week backcountry camping in Arthur's Pass National Park and loved almost every minute of it. The part I didn't love came on the hike we did over Avalanche Peak, which included a 1km section of scree descent. If you've never dealt with scree before, it may not sound so bad, but an enormous field of rocks, from nickel-sized to large boulders, with no vegetation keeping them in place, is not fun. Trust me.
I have this absurd, irrational fear of falling. Not of heights, which I have no problem with, just falling. Actually, the fear is of landing and being in unbelievable pain, but "fear of falling" sounds better. Usually the fear isn't a barrier to what we do, even while hiking, but Arthur's Pass is pretty remote, the mountains are rather high, and there's a lot of hiking over the tree line, which means more rocks and less vegetation. And then there was the scree. So poor David, who'd never really had to deal with me in a panicked, irrational state, had to hold my hand the entire way down the scree field.
In the end, it was sort of fun, because once I realized that we weren't going to tumble to our deaths, moving down the scree was a lot like skating. Skating through rocks, it's true, but still skating. So I may let David renege on the promise I made him give at the top of the field that we would never deal with scree again. But probably not anytime soon.
