Marble!

All my life...limestone. Limestone has to be the most boring rock in the world. Dull tan and gray. Nobody makes kitchen counters out of limestone. Granite was a slight step up. It's got little colorations in it, but let's be honest, it's a whole lot of gray. Plus, it's very coarse and dusty. The entire Sierra is granite. After 5 years, I'm still amazed at how much granite there can be in one place. In such large gray amounts, it loses its cool a bit.

Then I heard about this entire mountain made out of marble. Marble is different. Marble is cool. So this weekend we decided to head up and see this mountain of marble. You can read Kat's account here. Ultimately, we were denied our dream of traversing a giant glimmering marble rock, but I didn't come away totally empty handed. On Saturday, we stayed at a campground next to a spring, but found that it was too far of a hike to get to the mountain from there (over 10 miles one way). So we went to the other side of the park where the hike looked about 4 miles to a "Marble valley" next to the mountain. "That'll be a good spot," I thought. We could look across the valley and take pictures of the Marble Mountain, and its sibling, the Black Marble Mountain, then hike back out.

But Klamath National Forest lived up to its name of actually being a forest, and a view beyond the trees in front of us was rare. It was a nice forest, much more lush than the Sierra, though ironically it looks drier from a distance. Additionally, the Marble Valley was a bit of a misnomer. It was more like a meadow with no view. So I took lots of wildflower pictures (though not nearly as many as I passed up), and tried to get a vista shot at the top, which turned out kinda ordinary, but I had to have something to show for all that work. In the end, we hiked over more marble than I've ever seen in my life, and did happen to get a peek of the top of the black marble mountain (it was gray...looked like granite, go figure) though there wasn't a picture to be had. Next time we'll have to backpack in. BTW, I would have a video diary of our trip, but our fancy tape rewinder ate the tape, so it'll have to wait til next time.