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Cherie Thiessen - Travel Writer |
| Hiking the wonderland trail - Focus on Women - Victoria |
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| text and photography by Cherie Thiessen | ||
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A peak experience on Mount Rainier |
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One hundred feet above the chasm, the Tahoma Creek suspension bridge
hung, narrow, 250 feet across, and swaying. No good telling me that it was perfectly safe and had recently been improved. I love hiking but I have a raging and irrational fear of heights. This, then, was my nemesis, encountered on Day Four of our ten day, ninety three mile hike. I had dreaded this encounter from the start, hoping that somehow desperation would get me across, or that the bridge wouldn't be this high, or this frail looking, or that a miracle would waft me across. |
Because If I couldn't get over this, it was retreat. End of hike. Maybe
end of marriage, as my husband, David, likes hiking more than Love itself. It took two hours. Two hours of pacing, striding up to the bridge, starting over, backing up just where the chasm fell away. Finally, I fixed my eyes on a large boulder high on the other side, squeezed my terror into my stomach, and advanced! I knew once I had begun, I would have to carry on. There was certainly no possibility of turning around. This was my personal triumph on the trail, so I've started here, even though it wasn't the beginning point of |
our early September adventure. The high from confronting and overcoming this
fear carried me through the rest of the trail.
We've done a lot of hiking over the years, primarily in Strathcona Park on Vancouver Island, on the Olympic Peninsula, and in the Coastal mountains, but this was only the second time we had ever hiked for over a week. Almost every day you're staring at a different vista of Mt. Rainier. |
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