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Ridge Lake to Small Tarn Mile 2,417.56

by Erin Miller | Aug 2, 2015 | Hikertrash Cont...Part 2, Pacific Crest Trail

Sunday, August 2, 2015
Day 2: Ridge Lake to Small Tarn Mile 2,417.56
Miles: 19.58
Total Mile: 2417.56
Miles to Go: 248.67

“TIME TO GET UP!” Krav yelled from his tent. It was 6:00 a.m.

I’d totally forgotten about the Krav alarm! I rolled over and popped out of the tent, pleasantly surprised my feet, calves, and hips had made a more-or-less full recovery.

I sat down cross-legged on a bare piece of ground and started to make breakfast. To my right, the mountains the trail would be contouring around were awash in the soft peach glow of the early morning sun. To my left, in typical hikertrash style, Krav was making himself breakfast from bed. Behind him, a pika scampered up a large half-moon shaped boulder in the talus field and greeted the new day with a piercing “PEEP!”

Oh, my God, a pika! I’m of the opinion there is no cuter animal in the forests of the Northwest. Hell, even marmots are homely in comparison! (Sorry, marmots, I still love you, but we both know it’s true.)

Although the American Pika was denied federal endangered species status in 2010, their populations are dwindling. Because pikas’ habitat is limited exclusively to rocky talus fields in high mountain ecosystems, they’ve adapted to a very specific set of living conditions. The excessive heat and mild winters brought on by global warming have been lethal to pika populations across the Northwest. I felt lucky just to be seeing this little guy.

“There’s a pika!” I whispered to Bearclaw and Krav.

“Ha! It looks like a furry burrito with legs.” Krav laughed when he finally spotted it.

Abandoning breakfast, I grabbed my camera and every so slowly tiptoed towards the rock pile. I made it three steps before the pika let out one loud warning “peep” to all his little pika friends and disappeared beneath a rock. Even though I’ve gone from trying to pet every animal I see, to simply trying to sneak up and photograph them, my ongoing attempt to integrate myself into the wildlife population has thus far been a monumental failure. Wildlife: 10,482 Hummingbird: 0.

Passed Ridge Lake, the trail clung precariously to the steep wildflower filled mountainsides of the Chikamin Range. With every turn, new views of pristine alpine lakes nestled in dark green forests, and valleys that seemed to go on forever, spread out before us. Joe Lake especially caught my eye. If I’d have known yesterday how spectacular it was, I would’ve hiked the extra two miles past Ridge Lake and camped there instead! Within the first three miles of trail, Bearclaw and I had stopped to take so many pictures that Krav was nowhere in sight.

I’ve always found it interesting how all-encompassing the phrase, “Hike Your Own Hike” really is— from gear and clothing preferences, to how you interpret and choose to apply LNT principles, to the simple act of how you walk a trail. Hiking is one of those things that there is no “one way” to do. You can ask a thousand people how they hike, and you will get a thousand answers. Take for instant Krav, Krav knows he is at his best when it’s cool. In the morning, he gets on the trail, and he is gone within minutes. You can’t catch him, very few people could. The hotter it gets, the slower he becomes. His solution is to “kill” as many miles as he can, as quickly as he can. On the other hand, Bearclaw and I are slow and steady all day long. At some point around noon, we catch up to Krav for lunch, and for hours after that, we will be ahead of him. As soon as it cools off in the evening, he’ll blow by us again, and we won’t see him until camp. Besides the fact that we beat him to camp, today was no different.

When Bearclaw and I stopped for a morning break on a low saddle above the Park Lakes, we asked a German hiker heading in the opposite direction if he’d seen Krav.

“Yes, I saw a man that fits that description about twenty minutes ago. He was going quite fast.” Yup that would be Krav!

Even though Bearclaw and I picked up speed as we headed down the tight switchbacks leading around the edge of the stunning Spectacle Lake, it was nearly one o’clock when we finally caught up to Krav, cooling off in a pool halfway up Delate Creek Falls.

“It’s warm!” He assured us, as we crossed the footbridge below the falls.

I had my doubts, but it was hot enough that dropping my pack and splashing around in the shallow pools of a picture perfect waterfall sounded incredibly inviting. Hours passed before we reluctantly pulled ourselves away from the creek and continued up the trail. No one was looking forward to the 2,200-foot climb that would end our day. The trouble was this: we either had a fourteen-mile day with no climb at the end, or we hiked a twenty-mile day to the next available campsite at the top of the climb. There was nothing in between. At breakfast, we’d decided to go big.

At mile 13.9, the campsite at mile fourteen was starting to sound mighty tempting. However, when we arrived, the decision was made for us— a father/ son section hiker duo, Tin Man and Crawfish, had already set up camp there. Twenty miles it was.

Knowing we’d be so exhausted by the time we made camp that the simple task of setting up the tent would feel as complicated as disarming a ticking time bomb, we stopped at the last water source near the base of the climb for dinner.

“Are you ready for this?” Bearclaw asked as we packed up to leave.

I did a quick inventory. My ankles, feet, and hips were killing me, but that meant they still had feeling, which meant I was still alive, so that was a good start. I was exhausted. How we consistently did twenty-five mile days on the trail was a mystery.

“Nope, but let’s do this,” I replied.

“All you have to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other,” I told myself as we headed up the trail. I used the waterfall thundering off the glaciers of Lemah Peak on the far side of the valley as a measuring stick.

Every few switchbacks, I would come to grinding halt to see how much progress we’d made. Ever so slowly, “We’re almost halfway up the falls,” turned into, “We’re at the top of the falls,” turned into, “Yay, now we’re in line with the lower glacier.” Things were going fine until, half a mile from camp, I was reunited with my nemesis the fallen log. This particular log was one of those logs that was impossible to go around, impossible to climb under, and just the wrong height for easily going over.

“Oh hello, exhausted little Hummingbird….Did you miss me? Muhahahaha!”

Stupid, log.

Painstakingly lifting one leg over, I lay there like a cheetah hanging out on a tree limb, both legs and arms dangling over the sides, a good six inches off the ground.

“I’m stuck,” I mumbled to Bearclaw, my face smashed up against the bark, “Can you push me?”

He reached out and gingerly gave me nudge until I slid like Jell-O off the far side.

“Great, now how am I going to get over?” He looked as exhausted as I felt.

“Just swing your leg over, and I’ll pull you.” I offered pathetically.

Accepting this as a viable solution, he swung his leg over the log. I tugged on his backpack until he too slid over, and we both found ourselves on the winning side.

The log defeated; we stumbled into a sandy campsite tucked alongside a shallow tarn just in time to watch the sun set behind Lemah Peak. The last of the light hadn’t even faded from the horizon before we were fast asleep.

Morning Wildflowers

View of Spectacle Lake

Krav Taking a Dip in the Falls

Waterfalls & Glaciers!

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Snoqualmie Pass to Ridge Lake

by Erin Miller | Aug 1, 2015 | Hikertrash Cont...Part 2, Pacific Crest Trail

Saturday, August 1, 2015
Day 1: Snoqualmie Pass to Ridge Lake
Miles: 7.48
Total Miles: 2,397.98
Miles to Go: 268.25

“Are you guys excited?” My friend Tree asked as she drove us up to Snoqualmie Pass from her parent’s house in Ellensburg.

Truthfully, I was exhausted and stressed. Two nights of little-to-no sleep and I was a barely functioning human being. Mentally, I was still at work. Did I remember to send out that last email to let everyone know I had no intentions of working for the next three weeks? What if there was a catastrophic failure in a client’s auto-campaign while I was gone that brought down Facebook and society as we knew it? Ha! Who was I kidding, I didn’t even remotely have that kind of power! Most days I congratulated myself just for being at my desk by eight with my underwear on the inside of my pants. Still, I didn’t even have my laptop with me. I felt naked and vulnerable.

I was also nervous. Could we hike eighteen miles a day? Our “training” had involved two weekend backpack trips and three whole visits to the gym, where I’d spent thirty minutes pretending I remembered how to swim laps. Next to the lane of Master’s Swim Club members torpedoing across the length of the pool, I’d had all the grace and stamina of a giraffe caught up in a flash flood. Oh well, as Bearclaw liked to say, “Nothing gets you in shape for backing, except backpacking.”

Speaking of backpacking, I’d packed our backpacks in less than an hour because there just hadn’t been enough time. I hoped I hadn’t forgotten something important. During the entire drive to Ellensburg, I’d been going over it in my mind. Tent? Check. Sleeping bags? Check. Sleeping pads? Check. When I got to the end of the list, I would start all over again. I was driving myself insane. What I needed was to disconnect, to decompress.

And then, it dawned on me; we were headed back to the trail! In less than an hour, we would be at home in nature, and virtually nothing I was currently stressed about would matter. My entire life was about to be pared back to the essentials – food, water, shelter. The trail was about to kick my ass in the best possible way and remind me what was really important.

“Where are you supposed to be meeting your friend Krav?” Tree asked as she pulled into the parking lot of the only gas station in town.

“Just look for a tall skinny guy with dark hair and no beard,” I responded. Krav had started a week before us, picking up at the Snowgrass trailhead where snow had forced us to get off the trail in 2013. As Bearclaw and I had already hiked that section last summer, we’d told him we would meet him in Snoqualmie.

Snoqualmie Pass was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village; there were only a few places he could be. My bet was he was at one of the only three eateries in town. What would it be like hiking with Krav after so much time had passed? Was he the same guy? How much had he changed? How long would it take him to be like, “Oh my God, I hiked with these people for how many months?”

We found him sitting at the thru-hiker table at the Aardvark. He walked over and gave us a huge hug. His once jet-black hair was now a deep shade of chestnut brown, but other than that, he appeared to be the same old Krav.

As Krav unpackaged his Snoqualmie resupply box, he filled Bearclaw and me in on the last hundred and twenty miles he’d hiked.

“Two nights ago, I was listening to some music while setting up my tent in the dark when I started to feel like I wasn’t alone. I looked left, nothing. Looked right, nothing. Looked back to the left and all I could see in the light of my headlamp were a cougar’s head and eyes. He was just staring at me.”

“Really? Crazy… What did you do?”

“Dove into my tent and started yelling until it went away.” Krav smiled. God, how I’d missed this guy!

“It’s too bad Bearcat couldn’t be here.” He sighed. We all agreed.

By the time Krav had eaten brunch and was packed up and ready to go, it was early afternoon. We pulled out the maps, decided that if we could make it eight miles to the top of the climb out of Snoqualmie, we would be doing good, and hit the trail.

“Where is the trail from here anyway?” Bearclaw asked as we headed down the side of the highway.

I pulled out my Halfmile App.

“We are at PCT mile 2,390.64,” I responded giddily.

“You’ve missed that, haven’t you?” Bearclaw smiled, shaking his head in amusement at the obvious joy I was getting from consulting my GPS.

Had I ever! But not for reasons you, or he, might think. My love of maps and miles had nothing to do with my anal retentive need to keep us on schedule, or even a desire to know where I was. It was deeper than that. In front of me, two hundred and seventy miles of trail lay at my feet. Behind me, the trail stretched out over horizon-after-distant-horizon, all the way to Mexico. With that knowledge, came a great sense of freedom.

On weekends, when we hiked out-and-backs and loops, there were always a finite number of miles, a foreseeable end. This loop was sixteen miles; that loop was twenty. We always ended up precisely where we started, right back at the car. Not on a long trail, not on the PCT. On the PCT, we could hike for months and never reach our destination, and even if we did, we could always just turn around and hike back. There was absolutely nothing stopping me but my own fear and insecurities. Oh, and inevitably running out of money. For some reason, this thought put me in a complete state of Zen.

At the trailhead sign where the PCT diverged from the highway, we stopped for a few quick, “We’re back!” photos before excitedly ducking into the forest. We were back on the PCT!

The excitement wore off approximately three switchbacks in when my calves and thighs began to burn. We needed to gain 2,40O feet of elevation over the next seven miles? Ughhh… I probably should have made time for a fourth trip to the gym.

“We must have gone at least a mile and gained five hundred feet.” I thought, stopping to catch my breath and consult Halfmile. Or, you know, just a third of a mile and two hundred feet. This was going to be a long, slow, painful, ass-kicking.

A few miles in, the trail entered a talus-filled clearing, where I happily stopped to snap photos of a snowcapped Mount Saint Helen’s trying hard to still be visible through the smoky haze.

“You guys picked the hottest time of the day to climb this mountain, didn’t you?” A girl with long dreadlocks smiled happily as she and a friend breezed by us on their way back to town.

Fond memories of hellishly hot climbs out of Wrightwood, Cajon Pass, Castle Crag, Belden, Sierra City, Saied Valley, and Crater Lake, came flooding back to me. We did seem to have an uncanny knack for waiting until the hottest part of the day to climb. Were we sadists or did we just like getting sweaty and stinky? I’d already caught a whiff of my armpits, and I was well on my way to sporting a scent I like to refer to as “Eau du Hikertrash.” I am such a classy lady.

“Yeah, we have a tendency to do this kind of thing a lot.” I sighed.

As they passed by, I tried to spare their nostrils by keeping my elbows glued to my sides. I looked like a T-Rex, holding trekking poles.

Nearly to the top of the climb, I sadly realized that even though we’d been hiking for hours, I’d barely paid any attention to the trail. Instead, I’d been making a list of things I needed to do when I got back to work and prioritizing it for efficiency. No matter how hard I tried to turn it off, I couldn’t. It was as if the constant buzz of the I-90, echoing off the steep mountains around us, was tethering me to reality.

Eventually, the trail leveled out as it wrapped around a smooth rock ledge, passed over a short ridge, and promptly ducked behind a thick rock shelf. Just like that, the persistent din of traffic speeding towards Seattle, and all my anxiety was gone. I was officially on the trail.

“Do you hear that?” I asked Bearclaw.

“Hear what?” He asked, pausing a moment to listen.

“Silence,” I responded, closing my eyes and reveling in it.

We finally arrived at Ridge Lake around six, shocked to discover there were already fifty or so tents crammed into every campsite available. Every side trail we went up led to another tent. It took a lot of searching, but we finally found the last spot: a meadowy patch of grass, just big enough for two tents, hanging high above the serene lake.

Using the last bit of energy we had, we made our way down to the lakeshore for water. The lake was easily two feet lower than normal. Working our way through a muddy flat, we made our way to the rocks that lined the far side of the lake.

“Be careful when you waddle over here that you don’t fall in the lake Hummingbird,” Krav advised as he watched me work my way towards the spot he and Bearclaw had found to sit and filter water.

“Waddle? Did you just say waddle?” I asked indignantly. “That doesn’t have very nice connotations you know…”

“Well, you do kind of waddle.” He replied with a cocky grin.

Aww, I preferred to think of it as more of an ‘out-of-shape hiker shuffle.’

“Hey man, I am a Hummingbird, not a Penguin.” If I hadn’t used what little energy I’d had to waddle down to the lake to get water, I would have gone the extra four feet and pushed him in. But as it was, my hips and my feet were too sore. So instead, I filled up my Camelback and waddled back up the hill to bed.