Bear was back to his normal self this morning. Sassy told me he had stayed awake considering changes to his itineraries and formulating new contingencies since I had asked for an extra day getting to Bishop. He had also performed a food inventory and developed new menus. They were good to go with an extra day. Worst case scenario is they might have to hike into Bishop on empty stomachs. We will not have to resort to cannibalism or eating our own poop as peanut butter (unless we just want to).
We are definitely passing a northbound JMT bubble. Not only is the trail getting crowded, but deer are roaming everywhere through camp, day and night. This many humans in a concentrated location means one thing—plenty of mini salt licks. The heaviest concentration of deer do appear around tents containing older men. I wonder if there’s a connection there?
The trail started off with an easy decline. In fact, the first 5 miles to the low point of the day were prime “D team” miles. Once we started climbing, though, we started faltering. We kept turning around and expecting the “A team” to blow by. They weren’t there. After about a mile of our pathetic pace without Bear and Sassy passing us, I began to get very worried. It’s possible something happened to them, but more likely, we had taken a wrong turn. We decided to stop.
We have sent InReach to InReach messages to verify it can be done. Although theoretically possible, they are slow to make the round trip. The message has to first get sent to an orbiting satellite then get routed to the proper destination. In this case, it gets sent to earth to get routed back to space to find the other InReach and then get beamed down. If conditions are ideal, it’s a minimum of 20 minutes for the first message to make it, so 40 minutes for a response back. We had time to get water, have a snack, and a short nap.
Sassy finally appeared with Bear not too far behind. Bear had started having some back issues yesterday on the climb to Muir Pass and they continued today. About every 20 minutes, he’s been having to lie down in the trail and get his back adjusted by Sassy. His back is a combination of 2 things: the heavy food load, and his waist belt is slipping. I think he’s lost too much weight. They never mentioned the message we sent, and we forgot to ask because we were relieved and happy to see them.
It looked like a good spot for a lunch break in another 2.5 miles. That would make over 9 down less than 4 to go for our goal today.since we are climbing ever so slightly right now, we sent them ahead to claim spots. There are a few creek crossings ahead of us, but it looks like we’ll be heading out in the open sun after lunch.
After a shady, even cool lunch, we started to climb. The end of this valley is an old burn area, so shade opportunities are not very frequent. With 2000’ of gain in 4.2 miles, the shade will be greatly missed. In ideal conditions, Bunny and I can gain about 650’/ hour…it’s going to be a slog.
No surprise here, we both over heated. Our pace slowed to 1 mph—fast for snails and turtles, slow for every other mobile species. I couldn’t pass up a single shaded spot, even if it was only 3” wide. There was an occasional slow stream which allowed me to re-wet my sunshirt. Bunny was in terrible pain and even slower than me. We didn’t see Bear and Sassy after lunch.
As we got to top of steep section, we stopped again for another snack. We also said a prayer that they didn’t go to upper palisade which was another 1 1/2 miles. We figured we were less than 1/4 mile to the first lake. We had, mostly, survived the golden staircase. We didn’t know why it was called the “golden staircase.” Perhaps, this was a favorite fetish spot for certain types (not my bag). Or maybe, the short leafy plants turn gold in color in the fall.
We got to lake and saw an orange bandanna—Sassy’s. Our first thought, was “not again!” Then we saw a hiking pole and felt an immediate sense of relief. The A-team had stopped and left us a sign to not continue on (as if that were even a possibility).
They had their tent up but not gotten water yet. There were several other tents in the area, but Bear had grabbed us a spot near them. They had graciously taken a spot deep in the bushes (which looked suspiciously like a pooping spot to me, but if they were happy, I was happy. I won’t make any comments in the morning about their brown spotted footprint. We set up tent got water ate together.
Bunny was making video and I said “there’s a Bear behind you” as Bear started to walk into frame. A little old, grumpy woman came running with her bear spray. She got very pissed at me for saying there was a bear in camp. I tried to explain that my friends trail name is “Bear” but she wasn’t having any of it. At this point, I figured I was not going to get her to calm down, so I changed into PJs at dinner and put on floor show. The scared woman camping next to us retreated to her tent and we heard nothing else from her all night.
EFG