We screwed the pooch this morning. We normally try to maximize town time, yet, somehow we found ourselves hiking at 10:45–a full 15 minutes before checkout time at the hotel we had been staying at which was now 40 miles away. What in the hell went wrong? In a word, Bear.
I guess you’ve got to take the bad with the good. Bear takes care of the vast majority of planning and scheduling as well as alternative plans. 40 plus years working for NASA has him trained to anticipate every possible plan deviation and have a scenario already in place and practiced for said deviations. I only had one thing to do this morning (independent of the master plan). I had been assigned eating time from 7:38 to 8:17 with return to the hotel by 8:30. From 8:31 to 9:45, I had to get my food box bounced to Diamond Lodge Resort. 9:46, report to hotel lobby for verification of readiness for transport to trailhead. If we make all of daily goals, we get gold stars. 10 gold stars earns a zero day. Sassy lost a buttload of gold stars when she broke his glasses, so we may not be getting another day off any time soon.
We had been talking about elk on the drive to Elk Lake with our taxi driver. We were primed for elk. The minute we stepped on the trail, we saw not just a single set of elk tracks, but what appeared to be an entire herd. They were fresh on top of obvious boot prints. They couldn’t be too far ahead of us, so we turned on the gas. Stated another way, we were able to attain an uphill speed of nearly 2 mph (screaming speeds for old hikers with full packs coming off a triple zero).
We made the mile to the junction with the PCT in under 28 minutes. The heat we thought we were feeling from the sun, may actually have been air friction burns from our supersonic speeds. I headed straight to the first shady spot on the trail and sat down. Sassy was right behind me and said “look at all of them.” I got up expecting to see elk, but saw llamas. Lots of llamas.
I started walking toward them only to see a woman lying on the ground in obvious heat distress. We may need a primer on tracking. There were 5 women with 11 llamas that had just started out from Elk Lake ahead of us. They had planned for nearly every eventuality with coolers full of beer, extra tents, food for 4 days, and, I’m sure, makeup. The one thing they may have forgotten was electrolytes. They seemed to have the situation under control with a nurse handling the downed woman. We offered assistance but they said they were fine.
Every hiker we met for the last couple days we hiked, told us the mosquitoes were plague level from where they came. We checked the maps for where we were heading starting today, and saw the trail lined with ponds and wetlands. That was a big reason we had decided on the extra day in Bend—lack of motivation from fear of extensive bloodsucking. Some hikers we met even told us we were heading into burn areas. We’re sick of burn areas because they’re hot, dusty, and miserable enough without throwing in billions of mosquitoes.
Every last one of us said we could have used an extra day in town (on top of the triple we had already taken). Bear said if we made it to 5 zeros, he might not have the will power to return. Since we’d already gotten the ride, we decided to just head out as per Bear’s “alternative plan 20c£.” Even so, I could still use a nap since I didn’t get any the last 3 days. Bunny had me hopping all the time she was snoring away.
To recap, we were prepared for a pretty crappy mosquito infested day of walking in a dry burn area. We all had our head nets ready. What a relief that it didn’t turn out that way. What we had instead was a pretty hot and miserable hike through occasional pockets of mosquitoes that would drive the average city slicker nuts (but we aren’t you average city slicker). Better yet was that we didn’t encounter any burn areas at all. We came to the conclusion that people telling us we were going into burn areas just assumed we were heading north.
We didn’t stop for water until about a mile and a half before the place we had decided to camp. After the experience at Sisters Mirror Lake, we though it most prudent to try to get at least a mile from water for camping. That worked pretty well for us last year in Washington. And it seemed to work pretty well today. Of course we were swarmed while getting water, but about a mile after that, we got away from the worst of the (choose your own expletive now) mosquitoes.
We set up camp at a trail junction that was supposed to be at least 0.4 miles from water down a side trail. We also got lucky and had a nice breeze. The four of us were able to sit outside and eat together. In fact, this was one of the most pleasant evenings we have had on trail.
Bunny and I had to eat as soon as we got in camp because we hadn’t eaten anything all day. We both overate at The Breakfast Club this morning which was on top of having had Five Guys burgers last night. I felt like I had a rock in my stomach all day. I’m sure Alpine Mountain Chili will help calm things down.
Bunny and I were in our tent getting ready for bed by 7:15. Bear and Sassy managed to stay up past 7:30. We’re all worn out from our 3 days of rest. With any luck, 24 hours o& sleep will have us all feeling refreshed.
EFG