Price Valley: Peaks 4547 and 5354

Our first peak for today was an incidental: low prominence, just happened to be along our route, etc. But any explore is a good explore. So parked near some forest "residences" (read: people living on the forest) we were off. State land. Ignore the pile of carpet; that's indigenous.

Almost immediately, the path was blocked by a cattle guard and a bridge over the Weiser River. With a gate blocking the bridge.

Ruby snuck around the cattle guard, and Dave and I slid over the gate. Time to go uphill.

We started off climbing through some brush, looking for some sort of route. As you might expect, scrambling through the brush is not very photogenic. But then we got above all that into some nicely gardened forest.

From our humble summit, some surprising views. That's Nick Peak.

We did an extra excursion on the way down, which worked out really well. All hail The Loop! Indirectness pays off.

Then it was time for the 5-minute drive to our next (real) peak. Uh oh, snow on the road.

Yeah, real snow. Stop-your-car-snow. Millenials beware!

This guy also had to park lower on the road.

After following an old logging road, or a series of old logging roads, we headed directly up the ridge. To another old logging road.

They are everywhere.

This picture doesn't do justice to the colors involved. First, there is the yellow of Dave's jersey, on the right. Then there is the gold of Ruby's fur, on the left. In between, the grass widow's were a splendid purple.

Note that we are almost on top of something.

From the top of the ridge, the views opened up.

There's Brundage.

Jughandle.

Council Mountain.

And some old guys on the summit.

Note that there was a storm moving in, so the humidity had gone way up.

Nevertheless.... our ridge looked cool to the north. So that's where we headed.

And from there, a view of Pollock Mountain.

A bit closer, the ridge just to our north. Note the snow patch in the foreground. On this route, there was a lot of foreground to deal with.

Dave dealing with foreground. But hey, that's a road!

We followed the road back through varied terrain until we closed the lollipop. About there, Ruby started barking, and we had a nice conversation with two turkey hunters.

When we got back to the rig, the humidity turned into rain drops. Timing is everything. After libations, we tried to drive over the hill to the Smokey-Boulder Road, but after only about a mile were stymied by snow. Give it a week.

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