Prussik Peak in the Enchantments

It's a gorgeous warm Saturday so I drove up the Middle Fork Teanaway River road to find a new trail covered with the old familiar flowers: lupin, glacier lilies, Indian paintbrush, of an Eastern Washington spring. I'm somewhere on the Yellow Hill trail, and I stopped to eat lunch. The peaks triggered a memory: a wonderful week long August backpack trip I did in 2009.
It takes a lot of difficult hiking and over 3,000 feet or more, of climbing to stand at the foot of Prussik Peak. But, once seen, never forgotten. To the left is Little Annapurna, blocked by trees from this location.
I'm thinking too of the November trek I did in 2011 to see the real Annapurna peaks, in Nepal. I've been blessed since 2010 with an ability to schedule my jobs and my life around adventure travel, and my decision to become an ESL teacher was a deliberate one. I'm not interested in being a tourist, checking off a "bucket list". I want to visit, stay and give as well as take. The news of the earthquake in that desperately poor country filled with some of the nicest people imaginable, well it's a heartbreaker. Kathmandu has been high on my "teach ESL there one day" list. Since the SE Asian tsunami in the early 2000s, when I can afford it, each year I give a small donation to Doctors Without Borders. It's a drop in the bucket, with so much need, everywhere on earth. But it has to be better than doing nothing.