The Shaft

Zach and I took a drive out past Minnewaska to the waterfall at shaft 2a.

short drive, good tunes on the radio (surprise) cuz I can't find my iPod.

we started walking down the trail, spotted a cho-cho!



Then we made it to the river, beautiful landscape with river-hewn rocks, an early-summer stream (that is a post-winter, post-rainfall rapids!) Everything was just lush enough.



Some highlights:


the inside of a crazy dead tree


TOAD! AHH! (foreshadowing...)


step-waterfalls


zach sitting on the edge of the waterfall cliff that looks like this from the front:





the crazy thing was what zach stumbled upon while sitting and waiting for me to catch up. I was trying to get some shot, i think the dead tree shot above, when zach called out: "Andrew, man, get over here!! Quick!"

"What's going on?" I asked, partially excited at something cool to see, partially scared that something had gone wrong.

I put away the camera and quickly trudged up and over to him, skipping from jutting rock
to moss-patch
to fallen and decomposing tree,
then up to zach who was standing up on a high bridge made out of a newly fallen tree, which put him about 3ft above a small collection of water from the stream.
He pointed down and to my left: "Look at THAT dude!"

I strained my eyes towards a small pool, scanning for god-knew-what, "Look at what?"

"THAT!"









HOLY SHIT! snake ahhhh!

a friggin rattler, shakin its little tail away. we were staring death in the face.

or at least a terrible, terrible trip back down to the car and to the hospital.
still, there was something crazy about it, maybe mystical. something wise and majestic about this ancient
scapegoat and spiritual animal. it definitely had a presence to it.

so...we poked it with a long stick. it didn't really move much. it had either just eaten or it was old and dying. either way, we nudged it around respectfully and then left, asking it not to follow us. from then on we hiked with a bit more caution, and told every group what we saw. zach would say, before even saying "hi" or anything, "we saw a rattlesnake." it made us quite popular, they all wanted to see the pics. =)


then we drove home, i made some crazy veggie mac n cheese.
we ate, drank, had ice cream.
we were tired.

it was good.