23 + 2 useless miles
We wake up earlier than the college kids, and try to get ready without making too much noise. I think the lack of sleep the past few nights is catching up to both of us, and we're moving particularly slowly today. We do the 5 miles to Dumbbell lake at a record slow pace, getting there a little before 10am. The lake is beautiful, and the campsites are gorgeous, so we sit to take a short break.
An hour later and we tell ourselves we HAVE to get up from here and leave. There is no way we can only do 5 miles today, even though we both really just want to set up camp and stay. Barrel goes and gets water for us from the lake, and 10 minutes later, as I'm wondering what's taking so long, I hear "Pip? Hey Pip?" I shout back and Barrel tells me he's going to go swimming just for a second. I walk over to him as he climbs in the crystal clear water, and debate whether or not I should get in. I don't want to get my feet wet, because of my blisters and calluses (which, by the way, are doing so much better!), but I decide to get in halfway, sitting on a rock submerged in the water as Barrel swims around.
These lakes are so different from the ones I'm used to in Minnesota. For one, you can see straight down to the bottom of the lakes here, they are so clear. There also doesn't seem to be much, if any, fish, which is always my biggest concern when swimming in a lake. The water is cold, but not unpleasant, and every lake has me marveling at its beauty.
We have to walk through an old burn zone for a couple miles during the heat of the day, and I decide this is even worse than walking trough mosquitoes. There is no shelter from the sun, so we sweat and grit our teeth until we get back in the trees.
Soon we enter the Three Sisters Wilderness, which I will later decide is the most beautiful section of Oregon we hike through. The three sisters are three mountains in close proximity to each other, and we see them off in the distance, the first of the many large mountains in this area we will approach.
We walk through flat sections of prairie and grass, not much elevation gain or loss, which is lovely. In the late afternoon we get hit with a surprise rain and hail storm. I put my rain jacket over my pack, so that I can keep my gear dry, and opt for a cooling rain shower, since it's been rather hot and humid today. The rain soaks me quickly, and I find myself much further ahead than Barrel, as he took the time to get out his rain poncho. The storm doesn't last for more than 30 minutes, and soon the sun (and mosquitoes) is back out and heating up.
I am moving fast downhill, when I come to the Sister/Muir lake, which everyone has told us is beautiful. I stop and am swarmed by mosquitoes so fiercely that I have to run around as I'm putting my pants and rain jacket on, just to keep them from devouring me. Barrel catches up to me as I finish suiting up, and we walk down to the lake to look at it. The mosquitoes are so bad that I just want to get out of there, and tell Barrel I'm going to keep going, as he gets water from the lake. I'm walking quickly down the path, and see a few side trail jut off, so I quickly get out my gps to make sure I'm staying on the right path--good. I cruise quickly back into the trees, where the mosquitoes lessen, but don't go away, so I keep my visibility-dampening bug net on as I walk. I'm going slower, expecting Barrel to catch back up to me, but still see no sign of him. I take a break for a few minutes, and when he doesn't show up I keep going. After a half hour or so, I start to really wonder why he hasn't caught me by now, so I get out my gps again and check my position. After it loads it tells me I'm not on the PCT anymore. Wait, what?! It shows my position, not even on a recorded trail, although the trail I'm on looks quit well used. I'm parallel to the actual PCT by half a mile, but that's as the crow flies--it doesn't tell me how far I've gone down this wrong trail, or how far back it is to the PCT via trail. Shit. Shit. Now I understand why Barrel never caught up. I have two options: 1) bushwack my way back to the trail, as the crow flies, not knowing what obstacles lie ahead, or 2) turn around and head back the way I came, not knowing how far it is back to the junction I clearly missed the first time. I decide, based on the horror of my last off-trail adventure, that it's safest to just turn around and back track until I find the trail. When I finally get to the junction that intersects the PCT, I estimate that I was a little over a mile off trail, so I've now done about 2.5 extra miles with nothing to show for it. I see that the trail abruptly turned to the left a quarter mile after the lake, onto what looked like a stream runoff trail, while I continued straight, onto the trail that looked the most used. I blame the mosquitoes for leading me astray, as I was too busy being annoyed with them to have caught the junction the first time.
Now I know Barrel is at least an hour ahead of me, and I still have 8 more miles to do before I get to our agreed upon ending spot. I hope he realizes I am no longer a head of him, and doesn't keep going past the place we said we would end at when he doesn't find me there. I come up to a large, open section of the trail, and hope this is where he would have realized I was no longer ahead of him, as you can see miles ahead on the trail.
I try to go quickly, but the sun heats me up in my rain jacket, and I feel like a bag of steamer vegetables. I decide getting bitten is preferable to steaming myself to death, so I take off the jacket and slowly keep moving forward. After a few hours on my own, I find Barrel sitting on a makeshift log bridge over a small creek, about .5 mile from the mile marker we said we would meet up, and when I get closer he asks me what happened. I tell him that I decided to do 2 extra miles today, just for kicks, and explain how I completely missed the junction due to mosquito frustration. He says he wondered if that's what happened, and almost missed the same junction himself. I dip my feet into the freezing cold creek, only able to hold them in for 3 seconds at a time before they start to ache and burn, and Barrel laughs saying he told me so. I set up my tent a generous distance away from his, and with the creek running in the background, we both settle in for a peaceful night, talking back and forth to each other from our tents.
No comments:
Post a Comment