Ridge Lake to Small Tarn Mile 2,417.56

Ridge Lake to Small Tarn Mile 2,417.56

by | 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
Morning Wildflowers
View of Spectacle Lake
View of Spectacle Lake
Krav Taking a Dip in the Falls
Krav Taking a Dip in the Falls
Waterfalls & Glaciers!
Waterfalls & Glaciers!
Snoqualmie Pass to Ridge Lake

Snoqualmie Pass to Ridge Lake

by | 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.

Reunited!
Reunited!
Over the Talus and into the Woods...
Over the Talus and into the Woods…
The Wall that Blocked out the World
The Wall that Blocked out the World
Ridge Lake
Ridge Lake
Mirror Lake to Snoqualmie Pass

Mirror Lake to Snoqualmie Pass

by | Aug 23, 2014 | Hikertrash Cont... Part 1, Pacific Crest Trail

Saturday, August 23, 2014
Day 9: Mirror Lake to Snoqualmie Pass
Miles: 9.1
Miles to Go: 0

It was hard to be motivated to get out of bed knowing we were only nine miles from the end of the trail. I wanted to return to reality now, about as little as I had when we’d left Packwood after the storm. I had no desire to return to real life because somehow, it never seemed real. It always felt like something was missing. Hiking felt real, traveling felt real, adventuring felt real, living life to its absolute fullest felt real.

Work was really just something I did so I could afford the real moments. It seemed wrong to me that we had to buy our own free time.

At least since we’d gotten off the trail, I’d found a job I enjoyed doing and was working on a side project I absolutely loved. For that I was grateful. Most people I knew would say they tolerated what they did for work at best. I found that sad. If we’re lucky, we get ninety years on this marvelous planet and a third of that time is spent sleeping. It seemed like such a waste to spend two-thirds of the time one was awake miserable. Society felt like giant mouse-trap: you need a car to get to work so you can make money to pay for the car that got you there and the house you never spend time in because you’re too busy making money to pay for it. Sometimes I wonder if we just do things because that’s the way things have always been done and the system wouldn’t work if we collectively believed they could be done any differently.

What would happen if everyone suddenly realized they could be happy with just what was in the backpacks on their back? Maybe I needed to start a hikertrash revolution.

Meh. That was enough of that. I was giving myself a headache. I shook my head. I couldn’t dwell on these things. They made me crazy, and quite frankly, crazier was the last thing I needed to be. Sighing, I crawled out of my sleeping bag and prepared for the inevitable.

Besides, we needed to be off the mountain before the ultra-runners came through. The runner we’d met on break yesterday had said Mirror Lake was a popular destination for well-wishers to come watch the runners go by and by midafternoon it would likely be packed.

The trail was still damp from last night’s rain as we made our way over the small hill behind the lake. From that point on, we knew it would be downhill all the way into town. With gravity pushing us along, we hiked fast. There was really no reason to prolong the inevitable; it’s always less painful to rip a Band-Aid off quickly, right?

The trail hugged the side of a steep forested hill for a good many miles as it worked its way down into Olallie Meadow. Passed Olallie Meadow, we crossed one forest service road and then another, before dipping under a power line. Ugh, power lines, gross. I was fully aware that I was a hypocrite for that because, the first chance I got, I had every intention of showering with water heated by the very power surging through those lines.

“Do you hear that?” Bearclaw asked, “It sounds like cars on a highway.”

“That’s because the I-90 is less than a quarter mile east.” I sighed.

Civilization was nigh. I had to fight the urge to wrap my arms around the base of a tree and scream, “No! No! You can’t make me! Save me tree!!” And yet, my feet kept moving me ever forward.

By the time we reached Lodge Lake, the trail was a highway in its own right, as weekend warriors and day hikers made their own escape into the wilderness. It wasn’t long before we popped over a rise and ended up on a ski run.

We were halfway down the ski hill on our way into Snoqualmie when we met a couple headed up the road toward us.

“Are you thru hikers?” They asked. I smiled. Every single conversation we’d had over the last nine days had started with those same four magical words.

We gave them the low down, letting them know that unfortunately, we were hiking our last few hundred yards of trail. They had a cabin a million miles from civilization and had spent years guiding pack expeditions in the backcountry, they felt our pain at the impending return to civilization.

The man looked at us thoughtfully. “I have a poem I think you might enjoy. It’s called Lost. It was written by a man named David Wagoner and was based on an ancient Native American teaching.”

His gaze flew over Snoqualmie and deep into the steep mountains beyond as he recited this poem from memory,

“Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.”

I’ve said it a hundred times before, and I will say it a hundred times again: The trail has a funny way of being able to read you and knowing exactly what to do, or who to put in your path, to make everything all right.

It didn’t matter if I was standing in the middle of a towering forest of pines, at the top of a mountain pass, had my toes submerged in the sand and surf of a deserted beach, or was lying on the sun-baked earth of the desert staring at the sparkling night sky, I never felt lost in nature. In nature everything had its place, everything had its purpose, and if I let it, it simply invited me into its rhythm. I became a small part of the big picture. Civilization was out of sync with the rhythm of nature, I wasn’t part of something bigger, and I didn’t have my place. I was lost. Out here though, I always knew where I was. I was “here” and “here” was home. It didn’t matter how long I had to be away, it would always welcome me back.

We ordered lunch at the stand in front of the gas station and plopped down at a picnic table to wait for Trenchstar to arrive with our car. When our order was ready, the girl behind the counter looked at us and asked the age-old question, “Are you guys thru-hikers? If you are there’s a free can of beer with your name on it.”

“Yes, we are,” I responded without hesitation.

Not because I really wanted a frosty beer but because I’d had a trail epiphany. You don’t need to be thru-hiking to be a thru-hiker, just like you don’t need to be a hiker to be hikertrash. These things, and where you call home, are more a state of mind than anything.

Miles Left to Canada: 258 — Stay tuned for the end of the story Summer 2015!

An Old PCT Assurance
An Old PCT Assurance
The forest breathes.
The forest breathes.
The Forest Knows Where You Are.
The Forest Knows Where You Are.
Another Old PCT Assurance
Another Old PCT Assurance
Mile 2,380.6 to Mirror Lake

Mile 2,380.6 to Mirror Lake

by | Aug 22, 2014 | Hikertrash Cont... Part 1, Pacific Crest Trail

Friday, August 22, 2014
Day 8: Mile 2,380.6 to Mirror Lake (2392.9)
Miles: 12.3
Miles to Go: 9.1

“Oh fuck! Babe, wake up!” Bearclaw yelled.

Barely awake I rolled over and open my eyes just in time to see a horizontal flash of lightning streak overhead.

“Oh, crap!” I thought, still half asleep. “It’s raining!”

I rolled back over and quickly put in my contacts and grabbed my headlamp in preparation of having to bolt outside and toss the rain fly on the tent before everything got wet. Once again able to see, I rolled back over and looked up at the sky. No rain, no clouds, just a million stars strewn across the sky like a handful of glitter on black construction paper.

“What’s going on?” I asked confused.

“I just saw a UFO!” Bearclaw responded, totally freaked out.

“What?”

“I just saw a UFO.” He repeated. “There was a low rhythmic pulsing sound that woke me up. As I lay there listening trying to figure out what it was, it morphed into the sound of a small propeller aircraft, but it just didn’t sound right. It sounded like a bizarre recording, or like someone trying to play a sound they thought an airplane would make. It was so weird that I got up to see where the sound was coming from and a few hundred feet above the tent was a white, brilliantly lit orb. It totally freaked me out! When I shouted, “Oh fuck!” it shot off to the north at lightning speed. It literally covered the distance to the horizon in a millisecond. And then there were rapid flashes of light on the horizon where it disappeared.”

I guess that explained the lightning I thought I’d seen. Kind of.

Clutching our headlamps, we stared off into space for a long while before we finally fell back to sleep.

“Maybe it was ball lightning?” I suggested over breakfast.

“I know what ball lightning looks like. It wasn’t ball lightning.” Bearclaw knew what he saw, and it wasn’t ball lightning.

“Saint Elmo’s Fire?” I offered as we got back on the trail.

“It wasn’t that either.” Bearclaw sighed. “I wish you would have seen it.”

“An airplane flying at a weird angle? A meteor that was coming straight at us, so it didn’t look like it was moving, but then it hit something in the atmosphere and veered off wildly in a different direction?” I tried.

“Something military? There’s a base near Seattle.” I suggested a while later.

“I don’t know. Maybe, but I doubt it. It was weird.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him; Bearclaw isn’t the kind of guy that over-exaggerates or makes things up. It wasn’t even that I didn’t believe in aliens. I just found it a little disconcerting that a UFO was hovering above our tent watching us sleep. Seemed like a really weird thing for aliens to do. Why not attack New York, or abduct people for anal probing, or fix our environment for us? If you can master warp speed, you can probably solve global warming. But traveling light years to watch hikertrash while they slept in their tents? That was just plain creepy. Weird, creepy, stalker aliens.

“I’m not saying it was aliens.” Bearclaw clarified. “I’m saying it was an unidentified flying object. It was flying, and I couldn’t identify it.”

We walked through the forest in silent contemplation, detouring only once to check out an abandoned weather station.

At Forest Service Road 52, we stopped in a sunny patch for morning break and chatted with a woman from Portland who was out for one final training run before she ran the Cascade Crest 100 the following morning. When we’d gotten off the trail in the fall, I was in amazing shape. Seriously, our PCT thru-hike was the only time in my entire life I’d ever had a nice ass. I swore I would never be out-of-shape again. But I also didn’t want to give up eating like a thru-hiker. The solution?

I decided I would become an ultra-runner. As it turns out, you need to have a hell of a lot of spare time to be an ultra-runner. You also need to have some serious motivation and really, really love running. “If I can thru-hike the PCT, I can be an ultra-runner.” I kept telling myself.

Within months, I’d gotten up to about nine miles a day. And then, I came down with a chest cold that knocked me on my ass. When I finally started running again, I was back down to a painful three-mile walk-run.

“Ugh, screw this. I’m too tired for this shit.” I thought. I was halfway thru my second walk-run when I promptly turned around, headed home and gained a good twenty pounds. I had nothing but respect for this woman.

Speaking of gaining twenty pounds, have I mentioned how thick the huckleberries alongside the trail were? I think I ate twenty pounds of them a day which was amusing because digestion did nothing to alter the color, and it turned out Trenchstar was right when he said Mountain House dinners made you poo look like soft-serve! The berries had a worse effect on Bearclaw then they did on me. Before long, he had to duck back behind the bushes, leaving me to happily continue shoveling berries down my throat.

Bearclaw hadn’t been gone for long when a dozen men with backpacks, hiking quickly in a single file passed me by. They were built like linebackers, were all sporting crewcuts, and were obviously on a mission. Had they not been in civilian clothes, I would have pegged them for Army men. The day just kept getting stranger.

“You don’t think it’s odd that last night I see a UFO and then today you see a bunch of guys that look like military men masquerading as civilians headed in the same direction the UFO went?” Bearclaw asked.

“A little, I guess. Or maybe they were just the Seattle football team out for a weekend backpack, in the middle of the week.”

A few miles later we arrived at a small seasonal creek, marked on our Halfmile maps as WA2388. Sitting on the banks of the creek were a dozen more buzz-cut linebackers in civilian clothes. A few of them were filtering water into army-green canteens with heavy duty water filters. A few of them were resting in the shade. To our right, two men were standing just off the trail. One of them was holding a large case. The other was holding what appeared to be a miniature satellite dish, which was attached the case by a cord. They seemed to be scanning the air for something. When they saw us, they all stopped what they were doing and stared.

“Are those the “football” players you saw?” Bearclaw asked.

“Nope. The football players I saw were headed in the opposite direction.”

“Those guys were totally military. What do you think they were scanning for? I bet it has to do with whatever I saw last night!” The plot thickened.

“They were probably looking for Bigfoot.” I winked. But seriously, strange things were afoot in the forest.

The further away from the UFO site we hiked, the less strange the trail became. We hopped over three creeks as we wandered through tranquil forests of towering pines and bare hillsides thick with sickly sweet berry bushes. We stopped and chatted with a trail crew and thanked them for their hard work.

Late afternoon we made our way down a steep hillside towards the shallow, grassy Twilight Lake. We had decided earlier that either Twilight or Mirror Lake would be our home for the evening and since Twilight wasn’t that exciting, we opted to continue one. Mirror Lake was stunning— a deep, reflective pool of water tucked up against the talus and rock cliff face of Tinkham Peak. Where the PCT met the lake at the outlet, a small waterfall tumbled into the valley below. Stretched around two-thirds of the lake was forest, littered with dozens of campsites.

We worked our way through the forest and around the lake, finally coming to a stop at a small site near the talus-strewn face of the peak. The setting sun outlined the edges of the gathering storm clouds in bubblegum pink as we polished off our last Mountain House dinner and what was left of a once full bottle of Frank’s hot sauce.

We crawled into bed just as the first drops of rain began to fall.

“I hope that UFO doesn’t come back again tonight,” Bearclaw said seriously as he nodded off to sleep.

I wasn’t worried; somewhere out there was an entire forest of Bigfoot hunting linebackers ready to chase it off.

Carl Saw his UFO From this Tent...
Carl Saw his UFO From this Tent…
A Weather Station... Or is it?
A Weather Station… Or is it?
Mirror Lake View Two
Mirror Lake View Two
Mirror Lake, Washington
Mirror Lake, Washington
Mile 2,365.2 to Mile 2,380.6

Mile 2,365.2 to Mile 2,380.6

by | Aug 21, 2014 | Hikertrash Cont... Part 1, Pacific Crest Trail

Thursday, August 21, 2014
Day 7: Mile 2,365.2 to Mile 2,380.6
Miles: 15.4
Miles to Go: 21.4

The weather was perfect for hiking. There was barely a cloud in the sky as we packed up and left our campsite in the huckleberry patch and by the time we were halfway up the climb to Blowout Mountain, it was warm enough to stop and pull off our jackets. The views were spectacular, behind us Mount Rainer was still visible, though it was much further away than it had been three days earlier. Ahead, we could see a series of jagged peaks, jutting into the sky like a row of wolf’s teeth.

“You think those mountains are in Glacier National Park or is Glacier still too far away?” I asked Bearclaw.

“It’s probably the Cascades on the far side of Snoqualmie. I bet the PCT goes right through them. They look freakin’ spectacular.” He answered.

It turned out Bearclaw was right. I’d read somewhere that you can see nearly a hundred peaks from Blowout Mountain. The ones we happened to be looking at were likely some combination of Mount Stewart, Mount Daniel, Overcoat Peak, Bears Breast Peak and Chimney Rock. I didn’t really care what they were called; I just wanted to see them up close. Our desire to get off trail in Snoqualmie had started out at zero. Now that we were closer, it was even less than that.

Along the ridgeline at the top of Blowout Peak, we ran into a thru hiker in his late forties. Within five minutes, he had explained to us that he was aiming for a forty mile day so that he could be in Snoqualmie before the bars closed because he was in desperate need of a drink. He had been granted time off from work to deal with his alcoholism and figured the trail was as good a place as any to sober up. His tactics were simple, he would binge drink at resupply points, then hit the trail dry and maintain sobriety on all the days in between. He admitted that this didn’t work all that well in Southern California, where resupply points were close together. The further north he went, however, the farther apart his opportunities to drink became and at this point, he was spending a lot more time sober than he was drunk. By the end of the trail, he was hoping to have fully recovered. Personally, I was having a hard time deciding if this was the craziest thing I’d ever heard or the most genius. At the end of the day, my opinion was of no consequence, as long as it worked for him, that was all that really mattered.

He had barely finished his story when a Sobo joined us. A professional truck driver and mother in her mid-thirties, she’d recently read “Wild” and was south-bounding Washington State in the hopes of having her own epiphany. To say she was abrasive and opinionated would be putting it mildly. She went off on a tangent about how every other thru-hiker she had met on the trail had been a complete idiot and how the State of Washington should issue more bear permits to completely annihilate the bear population.

Her rant reminded me of something my mentor Gloria used to say. If you consistently have the same problem with people or you find the same fault in everyone you meet, the problem isn’t them—the problem is you, as you’re the only common denominator. In my own life, this advice had proven true time and time again. I thought briefly about sharing Gloria’s words of wisdom because I knew for a fact that every other thru-hiker on the trail wasn’t a complete idiot, but I had a feeling this wouldn’t be well received. She wasn’t a lot bigger than me, but she was feisty, and I was a ninety percent sure she would respond by punching me in the face. Instead, I crammed berry after berry in my mouth until it was so full that I looked like a chipmunk and the words that wanted to come out, simply couldn’t.

When she asked the NoBo about water sources up the trail and then explained to him why he was wrong, even though he had just come from that direction, Bearclaw and I decided it was time to split. Wishing them both the best, we hastily made our exit.

When I try to come up with descriptive words to describe the rest of our day, the word boring comes to mind, but that denotes that we weren’t doing anything and we were, we were hiking. Maybe underwhelming and lackluster are better adjectives.

The trail wandered in and out of overgrown clear cuts and second growth until about a mile before Tacoma Pass, where it finally entered an old growth forest. Bearclaw and I wandered off trail only once, to collect water from a coursing spring that bubbled out of the hillside and wound its way through the trees.

The only other noteworthy things we saw were a lovely little campsite next to trickling creek just past Sheets Pass and the expansive views up the valley from the backside of Bearpaw Butte.

Around three, we finally made it to what was marked on our map as “spring, spongy ground.” With nowhere flat to camp, we walked another quarter mile until the PCT crossed a disused forest service road.

“How about this? It’s flat.” Bearclaw asked.

“It’ll do.”

The road was relatively flat, so with numerous options as to where to set up, the only real question was fly or no fly? The sky, mostly blue with a few massive grey clouds accumulating on the horizon, looked like it could go either way. We set up without it and tucked it next to the tent just in case.

If it hadn’t been for “Walden”, I may have died of boredom waiting for bedtime…

Mount Rainier
Mount Rainier
The Cascades?
The Cascades?
What Were These Peaks?
What Were These Peaks?
Was the PCT Headed Here?
Was the PCT Headed Here?