true love?

This incident happened on the Berg Lake trail last week. On our way down to Whitehorn campground from Emperor Falls, I was a few steps ahead of Q and Idris. I see this woman climbing up the trail, with a backpack, nice looking, in a black t-shirt. I thought I could strike up a conversation with a pretty woman and make the Canadian Rockies backpacking experience even more charming. So I asked her where she was headed to. Her response was a deadpan "I don't know", and her look essentially telling me to MYOB. Not one to waste my own breath on a lost cause, I continued walking and in a few minutes Q caught up with me. Apparently, he too had taken an interest in starting up a conversation with the same woman, and he chose the path of sympathy by remarking that her pack looked really heavy and asking her how much it weighed. He got the exact same response from her "I don't know", and he too had to move on with no gain. We both compared notes and shook our heads on failing to make any headway with a single woman on such a beautiful trail.

We took a little break at the Falls of the Pool, and then this guy comes huffing and puffing up the trail. He is almost bent over with his pack, and looks completely exhausted. He asks me the usual question - how far to Emperor Falls, and then he asks me if I had seen this woman in a black t-shirt on my way down. I told him yes. He took a little stop there and then confided that she was with him, and couldn't carry her pack. So, he had left his pack behind on the trail, carried her pack up for some distance, and then went down again to fetch his pack, and essentially doing the steepest part of the 12-mile trail, twice. I was highly impressed..this is true love, I declared. Q's theory was different. They were certainly not married and the guy was counting on being rewarded at the campground later. Maybe Confucius was right when he say: Man who goes camping with woman has one intent.