ruby thursday

well I did it! or it happened to me! or something!
I’m thirty now. I do believe it rang it in very well, this new year of mine.












I started by taking the day off. Nunavut does very to give teachers one ‘discretionary day’ each year. Not a sick day, just a day to take off for whatever we want. So I took Thursday off. Lesley and I, together with a coworker’s husband, hiked up Mount Duval. It was an amazing hike, probably the hardest hike I’ve ever done. It was 650m up, but it took 6 hours of heavy climbing. Here are some pics.

The view into the park.












Nalu posing in the shade of an inukshuk. It really was a warm day - only -13!



And here's Lesley, being somewhat tuckered out early in the day. We picked up steam the longer we climbed. Until the end, of course.

Ok, so this pic is of me and it was actually today. But you can see Duval in the background. That's the one we climbed.






We finally reached the actual summit; there were about 13 ‘false summits’ along the way. I had such a feeling of accomplishment.


We climbed back down, sliding on our bums whenever there were appropriate patches of snow. The trip up took probably 5 hours, and the trip down took an hour. One particularly daunting slope (maybe 50 degrees with deep, soft snow for a stretch of 100 or 200m) that had taken nearly half an hour to climb up was slid down in seconds.

We arrived back at the house, sunburnt to a brilliant shade of smoking hot red, and cooked up a big birthday feast. We had a lovely semiformal birthday dinner, complete with fire hazard (see below).












All in all, one of the best birthdays of my life. A great beginning to a year that I was a bit scared of. My twenties were great; I really loved them. But how could a year that starts with climbing a mountain not turn out to be great?