Saturday, we decided to drive the Alpine Loop, from Provo to American Fork, one of autumn's most engaging scenic routes. I drove. We decided to stop at Cascade Springs, a series of natural springs and waterfalls connected by manmade walkways and bridges. Easy peasy.
Except it's all down in a hole. You can park in Upper Parking or Lower Parking, but Lower Parking is closer to the falls and thereby not so far a walk back to the parking lot. What goes down, must come back up or perish.
So we idled on down and saw this, and and sat on a stump and listened to the burbling, and the noises of the many other people sharing in a perfect summer day, some with masks and some without. This is the nature of the world these days. Most of us with masks took them off from time to time to pretend we watched the waterfall alone. It was worth the visit. And then we ambled back to the parking lot, but it didn't appear, and it didn't appear, and we realized that we were walking a very long ways uphill. We rarely do uphill anymore. Water was stored safely in our car.
The sun beat down on us, as we huffed and puffed, stopping at every bench that that was placed beside the path by some angel who had planned better than we had. Finally, we asked people cheerfully making their way down hill, "How far is the parking lot?" Just around the bend. And yes, there it was, the upper parking lot. We had come in a full circle. Now all we had to do was walk down the road to the lower parking lot, which turned out to be a greater distance than we had hoped. Tom has a habit of fainting of dehydration and I kept looking back to see if he was still ambulatory. Even downhill was exhausting him. I thought about waving down a car, which could have been so simple, but I favored vanity over the humiliation of admitting we couldn't hike down to Cascade Springs and back. Even with the car in sight, we sat on a large rock and contemplated it. Was it a mirage?
It was real. It contained bottled water and diet Cokes and chocolate. Life in its most basic form. Beautiful life.
At 65 years of age, with several health ailments, I fully understand the struggles you overcame on such an arduous hike. We need to plan better, understand maps and directions better, and most seriously of all, put vanity aside and reach out for help when available.
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