This is a trail?
Picking a way across the talus slopes from Emerald Lake meadow to the north saddle is not just a matter of putting one foot in front of another and following a trail. The landscape here is a twisting heap of sharp-edged rubble and the trail appears and disappears without notice.
I grew up wandering the hardrock mountains above Farmington. There the igneous granite and metamorphic gneiss weather into smooth round shapes. Limestone, on the other hand, does not smooth and round. It fractures. Endlessly. Water seeps into every hairline crack, then freezes and expands. The freezing water acts like a powerful wedge and splits the rock along even microscopic stress lines. The rock breaks vertically, then splits horizontally from neighboring layers. Once a piece is sufficiently loosened, gravity takes over. It can be spectacular.
Today the mountain is more active than I can ever remember it. Every few minutes a loud crack! echoes across the cliffs, followed by banging and rattling as some boulder topples down and releases smaller debris below it. At each sound I start and quickly scan the cliffs. A few times I see the path the loosened rock is tracing. More often I hear the sounds of a tripped slide, but see nothing.
It takes me over an hour to pick my way the mile or so across the talus. After just a few minutes I stop and put a brace on my left ankle. The rocks are loose and uncertainly balanced, and often tip beneath your feet. I retrieve my second pole from the back of my pack and begin using the two walking poles as rock checkers and additional balance points. It makes the going slow, but sure. And if one looks closely as he crawls across this tumbled moonscape he will almost always find fossils of ancient ferns and shelled sea creatures.
There is a strange mystery about this talus field. The rocks do not slope uniformly from the cliff towering on the north to the drop-off down the cliff band into Pica Cirque. There is a great irregular valley scooped from the broken boulders just out from the cliff face. It is hundreds of feet wide and perhaps twenty to thirty feet deep, and it runs intermittently along the talus field from Emerald Lake Meadow to the ascent to the saddle. I have speculated that perhaps this north-facing area filled in with snow that did not melt for thousands of years, so that the rocks that crumbled from the ancient cliffs (which must have towered higher than Timp does now) were for a time deposited away from the cliff face. Then perhaps the snow melted leaving a long trench at the base of the cliffs. Or perhaps avalanches fall from these high cliffs with enough force to gouge out a landing spot for themselves and shift the boulders out of their way. But these guesses are really just ignorant speculation. I don't really know why it's there.
This landscape always makes me think of Tolkien's description of the broken land below the mountains of Mordor. Nothing but lichen grows. Black ravens are circling overhead. A few dirty patches of snow nestle just under the cliffs, but fear of falling rocks keeps me well out into the scree. The distant views are spectacular, but mostly I concentrate on the rocks immediately below my feet.
About halfway across I meet my friend the Park City German. He's finished his ascent. He asks me about the glacier marked on his USGS map, and I confirm that he didn't somehow miss it. I tell him that he could descend down the glacier bed on a future hike if he so chooses.
I never do see any of the Canadian athletes. They must have come down the southern route. By now they're surely long gone.