Day 89: Mile 1016.9 - 1027.7

Was a bit of work getting out of Kennedy Meadows North this morning. There is a shuttle--driven by Ron of North Fork and Ron's Cafe fame!--between this spot and the trailhead. It runs at 10am, 2pm, and 6pm (or roundabouts there) and the seats 8-9. If there are more, then Ron does more rounds, although each round takes about an hour. But there was a little snafu in the morning: there's supposed to be a line for the shuttle, you're supposed to put your backpack down to hold your place, but when our round came up (around 11am), a bunch of folks got on ahead of us. So the use-your-bag-to-hold-your-spot-in-line didn't work. For the now 12pm round, then, we got to the line about 20 minutes early and sat next to our bags in line. That worked better, it seemed.

The morning in general felt both rushed and very slow. Rushed because we got breakfast at 8am, but the house was full and there was only one waitress, so it took over an hour to get food. Then eat it and try to make the 10am shuttle, only miss that round because the shuttle was already full, then sit around for an hour waiting, then miss the 11am round because of folks jumping the queue, then sit around for an hour waiting. Very go go go then wait wait wait. But in the end we got on the shuttle, listened to Ron tell stories about this region and some California history (John Sutter and Leland Stanford stories mostly) on the ride back up to the trailhead, and then we started out!

And promptly stopped because there was some trail magic from a guy who had planned a loop starting at Lake Levitt, but the road was in such poor shape that he couldn't drive out there--even with his SUV--and so had to abort the trip. So he was giving away a bunch of his food. We picked up a bunch of goodies--bars and cookies for me, oh, and he was giving away ginger ale sodas so I got one of those--and then, with extra food in bag, we set out.

The first part of the trail was a climb up to (supposedly) the last bit of the PCT above 10,000 feet. The climb wasn't hard necessarily, but at the elevation, and with the heavy pack (5-days worth of provisions), I went pretty slow. But it was a pretty climb: wide open spaces completely exposed, fabulously strange and jagged rock formations, a steady groundcover of wildflowers with small little blooms, all along a shelf trail that ran back and forth along the curves of the slopes. But the amazing part came at the top of the climb, when the trail came to a saddle near the top and looked out over to the next valley. And here I could see for miles and miles, into a land far below where the trees began again, and green meadows, and the far mountains in white and gray and red, and I thought: that is the promised land. And when Dylan came up, I turned to him and said, I have a hot take (Dylan listens to a lot of sports talk radio): I like this more than the Sierras. That's a flaming hot take, he retorted, and then, you're wrong. But my feeling was that this is the sort of landscape I can understand: the Sierras, while stunningly beautiful, can be overwhelming. There's just so much and, especially on this trail where you're always booking it, there just isn't always the time (or possibly even the ability were there time) to take it all in. But this landscape, where things are open and you feel you can see to the horizon and more--and you can see everything. You can see the treeline, you can see the streams form and trickle down into lakes, cascade down into rivers, the meadows form around the flow. You can see the *shape* of the land, how the mountain peaks give way to the hills give form to the valleys, how they then build back up to construct the capstone of the vale. You can see the *color* of the land, how it goes from the red soil to be covered by green, then in the distance, the white of rock, the gray of granite, the brown of the soil mineral-stained to near red again. It's magnificent and, standing there at the saddle, something that I felt I could understand if I lingered there a bit longer, stared a bit deeper. It was accessible: I could see myself plotting a course and walking it. Whereas the beauty of the Sierras is so astounding I'm almost afraid to reach out and touch it.

And so, yes: I like this better than the Sierras. (I am, after all, very simple-minded.) (To be fair, after thinking about it some, Dylan may have seen my point, but he did nonetheless say, too soon, too soon.)

After that, the trail mostly descended--until the end of the day where, naturally, it ascended to get us to our campsite--and we ended up with 11 miles and change. But the going was pretty smooth, the trail here is more easily graded and definitely less technical: a dirt path rather than a random-rock negotiation. So we should be able to do larger miles. In fact, I figure tomorrow we should be able to push all the way to Ebbetts Pass, which is 20 miles away. Yeah, that's pretty far, but if this terrain holds up, and stays this cruise-y, I think we can make it.

Physically, the chest is getting better: I'm still discovering new bits of lung, but the soreness is more localized now and the irritation (rather than sheer pain) more manageable. However, the cold is definitely getting worse. I slept the best I have since the fall last night: woke feeling pretty good except that I had a ton of phlegm and that phlegm had that taste I associate with a cold. I remember standing in the store, knowing that this could happen, and thinking what medicines should I get for a cold. And I couldn't remember. Now I remember: cough suppressants. Because I fear the cough is coming--I've already had intimations--and the cough is terrible: coughing and its cousin sneezing are now possible, but they still hurt. I can try to cough (can't get much depth to it still) to feel better congestion-wise, but then I'll feel worse bruise- and pain-wise. So if the entry today is a bit short and a bit disjointed, it's because I'm writing fast to try and get to bed early and hopefully get more recovery time overnight. (I even set my tent up on a slight slope so that my lungs and head will be higher up, in hopes that that'll help my sinuses drain downward over the evening.)

And that was the hike!

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Some notes:

-- Kennedy Meadows North > Sonora Pass > East Fork Carson River > Campsite

-- AC/DC mentioned this, but Kennedy Meadows North *felt* like a zero, even though we arrived one day, stayed a night, then left the next. I'm not sure why this feeling happens, but to me it's a Good Thing, because it suggests that the get-in-get-out strategy can not only work (as I first proved back in Ridgecrest), but can *feel* like a full zero as well.

-- At Kennedy Meadows North, I spoke with Big Brother as we waited for the shuttle. He showed me some of the shots he's taken with his camera setup (he has a fancier camera than me: one with a body-and-lens, rather than my simple point-and-shoot), and he had some great shots, mostly of people. And unlike my people shots (which are always from far enough away that the folks are unrecognizable), these were actual people shots, including a bunch of his brother Nightstalker where he added captions to make them seem like magazine covers. (And, honestly, the shots look good enough to *be* magazine covers.) He also had this awesome shot of a bear cub, heavily zoomed in, but still with the bear cub looking at the camera, with a lone yellow flower in the foreground just taller than its head for scale. It's a great shot. But the interesting thing about the conversation was when Big Brother started talking about the kit he had wanted to bring--better lenses, mostly--but he realized how heavy that would be, and he said, y'know, I'm out here to hike first, and photography is a second priority. He wants to do it--it makes him happy (and he has a good post-processing flow going with Lightroom so he can edit quickly)--but it's still a second, not a first, priority. And that's a very true thing: the first priority is to hike, the second is to do all these other things--like photography, or blogging, or vlogging--that are important because they keep us happy, but they're nonetheless still second. I mentioned to him my idea of coming back, do the Sierras, but do only 8--9 miles a day, and bring the full camera kit and make photography the first priority, do that sometime in the future, and he seemed to like that idea.

-- But that advice also emphasizes what I think the PCT has become for me: the Grand Tour where you get a chance to see everything, but inevitably something that more whets the appetite than satisfies. So if I have to see-and-scoot, well, that's ok, I'll have to come back some other day to really appreciate things. Some day some trip, but probably not today and definitely not this trip!

-- I didn't get much chance to talk to Ron, which was too bad: just thanked him sincerely for the ride at the end. I do enjoy talking to Ron--I enjoy talking to anyone with experience who's willing to share--but maybe I'll meet him again, somewhere up the trail. I mean, he's appeared thrice already, who's to say he won't manifest a few times more?

-- On the way up to the last 10,000-foot point, AC/DC came up with a trail name for me. How do like Paparazzi, she asked, maybe Razzi for short? Because every time I see you, she said, you're taking photos. (Makes sense: taking photos is usually when I stop.) And I said, hmm, don't paparazzis get paid for their photos? Because I don't take photos good enough for that! (Come to think of it, "paparazzi"--at least to my generation--has a pretty negative connotation: I wonder if this might be a subtle hint to stop including her and Outlast in my photos? I will have to ask.) But that's three trail names so far--Splash, Spotter, Paparazzi--that I've declined. Of the three I like Spotter the best, but it's also the hardest to live up to. I also have a thing about a trail name and what that does to identity--I should write up that rant at some point--but I said to AC/DC when she asked (and I honestly believe this to be true) that when the right trail name comes along I'll take it. I think I'm just too generic/boring/faceless to inspire folks to come up with a good one is all!

-- At camp, we looked across the valley and saw these fabulous pinnacles atop the ridge. And I asked Outlast about them and he speculated they were probably created by freeze-thaw cycles. That is, the rock is there, and when the snow melts the water flows into the weak portions of the rock. Then the water freezes and expands, pulling the rocks apart, and creating the distinctive cutaway jaggedness of the rocks.