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Caption: Running Through Fires Thru-running the Juan de Fuca Trail
- Vancouver Island, BC -
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Caption: We'd been running through the mountains, disconnected from the wider world.
Connected, though, to the world at our feet. We forded dry rivers. Watched glaciers disappear as we passed by. Felt the water rush from our bodies under an unseasonal sun.
We returned to our coast, in tinderbox conditions, for one final run.
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Caption: Things began as typically on the 47km (30mi) Juan de Fuca Trail hugging Vancouver Island's southwest shore.
Summer morning fog rolled out of the rainforest to greet the ocean, destined to be rebuffed, burned off in the increasing light of the day ahead.
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Caption: Working our way northwest, though, climbing and descending the fingers of glacial remnants that span the space between the inland high ground of the San Juan Ridge and the Pacific Ocean, the coastal fog seemed to stubbornly linger, to encroach even on the forest, an eerie orange filter through which the foliage began to shine neon.
(Note: None of the images in this story have been colour altered.)
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Caption: A few miles later, the trail bent west again, to steal one of its occasional coastal kisses.
The view stopped us in our tracks.
We knew the swell lines came from the open Pacific, but from where came the light that turned their contours into mud?
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Caption: The effect was distorting, both visually and emotionally, forced to question our eyes and our cameras - "Are you seeing this too? Did I hit a sepia setting on my camera I didn't know about?" - to wonder at what forces had slid this gel across the theatre lights of our surroundings.
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Caption: With little else to do and long miles yet to cover, we rubbed our eyes and continued, running through the odd uncertainty in today's information saturated age of what was going on in the world around us.
The inability to answer the question Why?
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Caption: We speculated at forest fires, but couldn't be sure. And if fires, where were they burning? Just up the trail? Or thousands of miles away, fanned by summer winds into our quiet forest world for a day? Were these giants at risk? Were our friends, in communities up the road?
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Caption: We ran towards answers.
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Caption: (And so, ran as we always do.)
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Caption: Ultimately coming to find, at the end of the trail, that the fire we ran through was not our own, but that the land to our east was indeed burning, sending its pain east on the wind, to colour our run.
To leave an umber stain of memory on us, to carry home as we exited the forest.
A reflection and a reminder.
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Caption: "What matters most is how well you [run] through the fire." Charles Bukowski