I’ve got about forty-four hours left until I leave for what may turn out to be one of the adventures of my lifetime. I’m going here:

This is Sandra Lake, twelve thousand feet up in a remote corner of Colorado, ringed by three fourteen thousand foot mountains, including Wilson Peak. Sandra Lake was named for my favorite once-removed cousin by her parents, who prospected for silver and wrote geology theses there as honeymooners in 1932. (Just try to tell me that isn’t the most hardcore honeymoon you ever heard of! And Cousin Sandra wasn’t born at the time, in case you’re thinking unseemly thoughts about my great aunt and uncle. They bought the land and returned there many times over the years with their family.)

Cousin Sandra, called Saucy in the family, died unexpectedly last winter. This is a memorial trip for her and a 70th birthday celebration for her husband Bill. Here’s Bill as I last saw him, on his Virginia farm in March:

We won’t have the baby oxen, Ruff and Reddy, on this trip, but we will have seven or eight horses. We’re renting them from the OK Ranch in Rico, packing up to the lake to stay for three days, and then riding part of the Calico Stock trail. I’ll be gone ten days in all. It will be the longest time I’ve camped, the highest elevation I’ve visited, and probably the widest variation in weather conditions I’ve ever had to prepare for. I’m thrilled, but it’s also a daunting trip. My pack horse will carry my gear for me so I don’t need to worry about weight as much as I would if I were backpacking. But the temperature might range from 75 to 25 degrees, and there could be high winds and rain or even snow. So today I’m piling gear all over the house and decided what to take. I’m considering buying a tent from my neighbor, as the one I was going to borrow from my parents mysteriously disappeared and the one I took from Mr. Garter’s parents’ attic looks doubtful for surviving inclement weather a thousand feet above treeline. And naturally, I have to decide what to knit.

Top candidate? Socks. On two circs, of course. We can’t have dpns poking through my saddle bags and pricking my horse. And on a trip of this magnitude, it hardly seems appropriate to bring anything but Trekking sock yarn. I know I’ve got two balls in the stash, but I’m leaning towards a nice three-ply marled burgundy/russet/gray/black colorway. I started making a Jaywalker out of it when I was driving across the country, but after about four inches I discovered that it was going to be too small. It’s been languishing ever since. So an essential part of today’s packing effort will be swatching for a new pattern. I enjoyed making my one pair of Jaywalkers, but I wasn’t really enthused by the results with this Trekking anyway. It wants to be something else. Stay tuned.

I’ll try to post tomorrow, but then it’ll be silence from this blog for the next ten days. Wish me fair weather, friends. It might be hard to knit by headlamp wearing gloves in a tent in a snowstorm at 12,000 feet. Or it might be really cozy. But hopefully I won’t have to find out.