Day 100: Mile 1187.0 - 1195.4
And we woke to a red dawn.
Last night we had went to sleep under clear blue skies. The mushroom clouds of the Dixie Fire blighted the horizon over the distant mountains, but they were far off. But by morning, I had woken twice in the night for coughing fits, and then got up to the smell of campfires, looked out, and just saw haze. The forested mountains just on the other side of the canyon?--now mere silhouettes of trees against a fog of gray.
We got started early--Double Snacks had a package at the post office and was chasing its 10:30am-12:30am hours--and hiked down to Highway 49. The hike itself was mostly through hazy views, with a blood orange sun casting the woods and canyons in perpetual golden hour. Would have been beautiful--the plunging canyons, the noisy creeks tumbling down boulders, all ensconced among the tall trees--if not for all the smoke that just got thicker the farther we went. The trail passed over a lot of bridges and a lot of creeks--enough that by the end I got a bit disoriented. (For most of the way our direction had followed the creeks and streams downstream, but for the final creek our direction pointed upstream, which was weird.) Double Snacks--who actually did the trail through Oregon and Washington back in 2017--noted that the scenery was very reminiscent of Washington, a sort of sneak peek of what's to come, hopefully minus the smoke.
We got into Sierra City well in time, picked up packages, got food from the General Store (where the portions are ridiculously large, even given the absurd appetites of thru-hikers), then got a ride from Shutterbug, a friend of Double Snacks. He drove us into Truckee about an hour away where Double Snacks stayed with some friends, while I hunted for a room. Turns out Truckee is pretty much booked solid over the weekend--unless I wanted to pay $400-$500 for a room (there was even a room for over $1000!), there weren't any options. There was an AirBNB spot for only $400, so I tried that, but then it turned out it had already been booked for the night. In the end, in desperation, I tried the hostel in town--it had been booked solid when I had checked earlier, but now, magically, it had a spot! I grabbed it--it was a more expensive private room, but at less than $200 was a steal in this town on this day!--and later found out that someone had canceled and I had checked at just the right time. Lucky! And the hostel will do your laundry (for $5), and I got my own shower, there's even an ice cream counter in the front! Only thing missing is the air conditioning, but they give me a fan and an open window, and that'll just have to be enough!
Right now, the talk is all about the fire. We had originally planned a skip up to Old Station (Mile 1374), but it seems that now Old Station is covered in smoke, with rumors of ash raining down. Our next skip up had been to Burney (Mile 1410), but Double Snacks had friends up there who said, yeah, smoky skies up there too and you should skip further ahead. So now we're contemplating skipping all the way up to Dunsmuir (Mile 1501). If we do, that'd be a 314 mile skip from Sierra City (Mile 1187) to Dunsmuir (Mile 1501). That's more than 10% of the trail! But there's also not much we can do: fire is fire.
So today was a relatively short hike, followed by a long car ride, followed by some panic in finding a place in Truckee, followed by getting lucky and finding a place (and a relatively reasonably priced one at that), followed by the usual town chores (resupply, laundry, shower, charge, wash). A long day, now that I write it, although it didn't feel like it. But mostly this is a transition day, where we get out of the smoke and plan our next move. It's going to suck to have to skip so much of the trail, but our hands are tied here. The only solution would have been to get here earlier, maybe a week or two earlier, but invoking that would require some anti-causal shenanigans and, unfortunately, my physics just isn't that good.
And that was the hike!
-- Campsite > Milton Creek > Haypress Creek > North Yuba River > Highway 49 > Sierra City > Truckee
-- In the middle of the hike down to Highway 49, I started sensing an itch in the back of my throat, at my tonsils. At the time I couldn't figure out if this was an irritation of my cold, or of the smoke. Turns out it's of the smoke: by the time we got to the clearer (though not entirely clear) air of Truckee, it went away. So, yeah, the smoke does eventually start to incur health effects.
-- There were a *lot* of hikers milling around Sierra City. We hung out by the visitor center (which had free, *clean* bathrooms), where we bumped into Dennis and Twilight. Dennis got his own ride out, Twilight was with the Max and Marina group, and was waiting for them to return with a ride. But at the General Store there was Sheldon and a whole other gaggle--just lots of hikers everywhere, all talking about the fires, all looking for a way out.
-- The Sierra City Visitor Center was open, and we talked a bit with the lady behind the desk. Turns out the Dixie Fire is being pinned on PG&E: as she said, they ultimately started the Paradise Fire and burned everything to the west, now they've started the Dixie Fire in essentially the same spot and are burning everything to the east. All from old equipment that should have been upgraded decades, if not half a century, ago. (Can you tell that the residents are a bit miffed at PG&E?) But more importantly, it turns out her son is heading out tomorrow as a volunteer firefighter to help fight either the Dixie Fire up north, or possibly the Tamarack Fire down south of Tahoe. And that's when the fires are no longer about political football or blame, but become a real thing with gut-wrenching stakes. I can only hope the best for him and for all the firefighters going onto the line; all I know about fighting forest fires comes from Alan (who leads the Laguna Canyon Foundation's trail maintenance crews that I often volunteer with), who notes that firefighting is a "young man's game": tough, physically demanding, and dangerous. Best of luck to all of them!
-- The hostel does your laundry, and offers loaners clothes over by the hiker box. I went and picked up a pair of shorts small enough to fit my petite waist, and brought my clothes to the front desk. Did you get loaner shorts?, the girl on duty asked--I was wearing my rain jacket, so likely they covered the shorts. Yeah, I said, showing them off, then jokingly: and I think they look pretty good. I think they're women's shorts, is all she said. Well, nuts: I just don't notice these sorts of things!
-- When we first got into town, we met up with Ranger Danger and Sock Monkey--the friends that Double Snacks was staying with at a house in town. They were at Dark Horse Coffee, a couple streets down from the main strip, and when we got there who should be there but Cookie Pie! And I said hello, and we caught up some: she had had some adventures with the storms in the Sierras. Overall, she had taken it slower, and I think had gotten off earlier: I don't think she had beaten the Tamarack Fire, so got off around Sonora Pass/Kennedy Meadows North? Something like that. But, in the end, does it matter?: here she was, at the same spot as us! She's also planning to rejoin the trail at Dunsmuir, although she'll be going home to reassure family for a few days first. But it was good to see her, and good to see that she was still sporting the absolutely amazing blue bonnet!
-- I had forgotten my resupply box in the car, so when Shutterbug drove Double Snacks back to town for the laundromat, I met up with them as they waited at the Alibi Ale, a local bar. And I went in to order some food and a drink and talked with the bartender some. Are you a PCT hiker?, he asked, yeah, I replied. Have you done the PCT, I then asked, in reciprocity. Yeah, he said, I did it in 2019. Which was when my eyes got wide: 2019, that was a huge snow year, I said. Yeah, he said, the joked: I later found out that there's actually a trail up Forester Pass! We talked some about the trail, then I asked him what he recommended for non-alcoholic beverages. He listed off a bunch of stuff but one thing I hadn't heard of before, a sort of ginger kombucha. So as per my usual practice of eating anything with a weird name, I said: I'll try that. It's good, he said, I don't normally like kombucha but I like that one. And it turns out: he's right! It *is* pretty good. So if you go to Alibi Ale and want something abstemious, try the ginger kombucha!
-- Also at the Alibi Ale, I met Augusta and her daughter, Goldilocks, who Double Snacks and Shutterbug were sitting with. Came into the middle of the conversation, so I'm pieceing things together here, but they're doing the trail, Augusta is a top doctor in Sweden, Goldilocks is 17 years old, Goldilocks has a deadline where she has to get off-trail by mid-August to go back to school. She had a deck of cards, which she shuffled when her hand were idle, and I asked to see them. Can you do any tricks, she asked. No, I said immediately, but let me show you something. And I proceeded to show her a basic trick technique: a double lift. It's the basis of a lot of card tricks, you just need to put a story around it to make it good. (And I used to know a *good* story, with a lot of double lifts and some other techniques, but I can't remember it these days.)
-- There was a guitar in the hostel, which I picked at in the late evening just on my own. And was terrible, absolutely terrible. Granted it's not a bass, but the bottom four strings are the same and it's good enough for little motifs. But I tried to make something up, and nothing, absolutely nothing, came. Is this proof that my music chops are atrophying? Yeah, probably, unfortunately. At this point, I'm a bit scared to sit at a piano...
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