Date: 9/20/2021
Copyright 2021 & copy;
On the second day of the first session cardigan trip, (Monday, September 20, 2021) I woke up much more prepared than the first because I had already gone on a hike. I got on the bus, and luckily, Maddie was there! She had had a soccer game the first day, but finally, Gemma, Alice, Maddie, and I were reunited. We gathered with our group leader and groups again when we got there, knowing that today would be the hardest day. Our group began and again, I found about two more cucumbers of the forest plants to eat. Mr. Woolner was with us that day, and we stopped a lot of times to observe the streams, moss, or trees there. This time Emma had the map, and I took so many pictures going up that I barely had storage for any coming down. The hike up was 2 miles, and about 1.5 miles up to firescrew, we started to approach very steep and slippery rocks, telling us we were close to the summit. They were hard to get up and required a lot of arm strength and grip, but it was definitely the most fun part of the hike. When we were in the rocky area, we saw all the coolest things, one of them being a glacial erratic. It was a huge rock, about my height and four times my width, and had probably rolled down due to erosion. It had lichen all over it. We also saw a lot of squishy moss, which I felt lightly and felt like a very wet cloud! When we finally got up, we saw a bunch of shortened trees struggling to live in the alpine zone. We took some summit selfies but did not stay up there for long because the other group was coming up too. On the way down, we talked about advertisements a lot of the time and even had a few minutes of silence to enjoy nature's sounds. When we were getting tired, Meara, our counselor, gave us a bunch of riddles and games. We ended up not going to Cardigan Mountain, but firescrew was amazing. We played Hinky Pinky, and one of the riddles was about Penguins paddling through the desert. When we got back, it was pretty late and our bus came back pretty late. However, it was one of the best days of the year and I had a lot of fun looking at the pictures I took later.
Day 2: I think day 2 matches the theme of regions,
because on this day we went to the summit of Firescrew. I learned later about this, but when we got to the top, we were in the Alpine zone. (also the Alpine region.) You could tell that it was a different region from the rest of the hike because of how much the plants were struggling to live with the lack of oxygen that high up. There was a little bit of water, probably from the last rain, and the plants growing up from the rock were tan and thin. That region was also really fun to see, because of how windy and cold and bright it was, due to how high up it is. Another example of regions are the boundaries that you can see on the mountain, that are each different boundaries of a watershed.
