After a week of staying indoors just trying to escape the heat, we finally get a beautiful sixty degree night with a cool breeze. And with a little wine in me, I decide to spend my Saturday night hiking (and getting lost on) Mount Royal. When I reach the park at the base of the mountain, I see the Angel statue forms an eerie silhouette against a cloudy orange night sky (see picture above). It's really quite apocalyptic. And with that I strap on my headlamp and ascend.
At first everything is going so well, and then I take the wrong route up the mountain, you know, the road less traveled by. It turns out to be a dead end, a thirty foot rock face and it's not just at a ninety degree angle with where I'm standing... no, that would be too easy. It's more like a sixty degree angle, a pitch-black-thirty-foot-colossal-monster of a rock wall looming over me. But I'm quite stubborn about it, and rather than turn around I decide to get my hands dirty and scale the beast. It's around one AM, by the way.
There's a fifteen foot drop below me, and a fifteen foot climb ahead of me, and that's when I realize I can't go any further. There's nothing to grab on to. For a split second I wonder what my epitaph will read. "Peter Barry: beloved son, died while doing what he loved most - drinking wine and hiking mountains." There are worse ways to go. Anyways, I climb down, defeated, and then I shine the headlamp to my right. "Oh," I say out loud, "there's the path." Whoops. So I reach the top, and my God is it gorgeous (see pictures above).
This is just the way I do things, it's not the way it should be done. Not at all.
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