Return To Pass Creek - Part 2

We stayed at the campground for almost two hours.

Wandering, picture taking, walking trails, taking our time as we circled back to the Suburban.

There were pull offs that we had bypassed on the way up to the campground, and once we were done here we planned to stop at some of those pull offs, because we had seen that they overlooked the valley far below................

One last look at the small frozen lake - pond - before continuing further..............

The first pull off we came to LC pulled the Suburban off the road, and we all three eagerly climbed out of the vehicle and headed up the double track trail.

Filled with a sense of adventure in this wonderful place, that felt so far removed from the lower Pass Creek, and a world away from the highways on both ends of the pass that could both lead us back to Atomic City and home..................

The trail simply........ended.

It ended in nothingness.

A view of the valley below us.

Endless mountains, endless trees, endless silence and a blue sky that spoke of a beautiful late fall day.

Kory reached the end of the trail before us of course, and as we approached I watched my dog.

It was SO GOOD to just let her roam free and know that she would wander, but not too far.

As we got closer and I saw her staring off into the valley below, I wondered what a dog thinks of such scenes.

Was she thinking of bunnies to chase?  Was she thinking of her life in a cage in a kill shelter in Florida?

No matter what her life holds for her in the future, she has had more freedom with us than at any other time in her life.

That thought pleases me.

My happy dog pleases me..............

Showing off his mountain hand gun...................

The view across the road from one more pull off..............

We had seen these same hills and mountains on our trip to Pass Creek Pass with Gary a couple of months earlier.

On that day we had looked up at them.

This time we were looking out and looking down on them.

The sheer beauty and vastness of the world from this vantage point was humbling.

It always is.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

We had left the house late morning and now it was mid afternoon.

As we dropped down to the road that wound its way through the pass proper we did some quick math.

There was a trail just on the outer edge of the pass entrance that we wanted to investigate before heading home.

Once we had done that we still had 40 miles of two lane highway driving before we would reach the house.

No problem.

We had this.

We decided to make one more quick stop at the creek before leaving..................

There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of wild and undefined misgivings..............J Sheridan Le Fanu