Day 101: Mile 1501.2 - 1507.2
So today was the day of the Big Skip. The Dixie Fire continues to burn (as well as the Tamarack Fire down south) and we left Truckee under smoky skies. We then headed up north on Shutterbug's Shuttle under even smokier skies: at times, the visibility was about 100 yards. We drove all the way to Dunsmuir to get back on trail; luckily, at this point the skies above are blue, although the distant mountains still look a bit fuzzed-by-haze, which is likely smoke from the fire.
That's a skip of over 300 miles.
Straight up: I admit that I don't feel good about the skip. I was messaging Dylan and Uno in the morning: they had gotten back on trail at Burney, roughly 90 miles south from here, and said that the air, while smoky, was bearable. So maybe that would have been a better place to get back on trail: sure, the air wouldn't have been as nice, and sure, it would probably have wrecked havoc with this cold I'm still recovering from (and which is lingering, mostly because I don't have time to fully rest and recover), but this jump is huge. It's more than 10% of the trail! It's large enough that I'm thinking that, if I finish (knock on wood), I may not come back home, but instead try to arrange a ride to Burney and hike the 90 miles between Burney and Dunsmuir. Only thing is I don't know what the weather will be like then.
But we're here now in Dunsmuir, where it's hot (and, again, I'm sitting in just my skivvies in the tent), and where--owing to how long it took to drive here and how late we got started--we only did 6 miles or so today. But those 6 miles: very different from came before. I was discussing this with Double Snacks, who had been discussing this with Sock Monkey before that: what makes this forest, these woods, different than the ones we'd just left, near Sierra City? Because they *are* different, they *feel* very different. These woods feel much denser, they feel much deeper and darker: these are the woods where you can start to understand why people would believe in mythical creatures hidden in the woods. (Whereas in the woods we'd left, sure something could hide for a while, but eventually it'd get found out.) And Double Snacks speculated that the difference was that the trees here were thinner and thus the trunks denser, and that these woods had more of a middle layer (there was a term she used for this but I forget): there are more plants that are shorter than the trees but still taller than bushes, and these plants often have green, lush leaves. The middle layer creates a whole different feel to the woods here, much more lush, dense, and humid.
The hike itself was through the woods, up some immediate climbs (and the PCT greets you--as always--in style, when your pack is loaded with 6 days of food and 2 L of water!) then a bit more mild. But always in these thick woods. We eventually camped in a gully at a water source. There are a lot of folks on trail now--diverting everyone around the Dixie Fire has caused what was once a bevy of spread-out hikers to suddenly bunch together--so spaces were limited. There were some use trails around the gully, and I wandered down them (sans pack, of course) in hopes they lead to additional campsites, but alas, they were just actual trails that followed the creek downstream and upstream. So instead we settled for some makeshift sites. They're fine, though: I have plenty of experience setting up the tent in less than ideal conditions, including ones where the site is comparable to the footprint, so this wasn't new.
All in all, hiking-wise the day was pretty short: we got on trail around 5, hiked about 6 miles, then camped. Rather, the day was taken up by the drive, which was pretty long! (Long enough that I fell asleep in the car!)
-- Truckee > Dunsmuir > Interstate 5 > Fern Spring > Indian Creek > East Fork Sulphur Creek
-- Yesterday I met Skippy, who's a recent UC Berkeley grad, with a degree in geology. What do you do with a degree in geology, I asked, and she really didn't know either: she just knew she found rocks fascinating. (Which is fair: to be honest, as Ben Mossawir once pointed out, the reason we kept at electrical engineering was because it was intellectually stimulating, more than any thoughts we might have had of a job. In fact, I didn't figure out what "job" I wanted in electrical engineering until the end of my 5th year, in EE315, Data Converters, with Professor Wooley. That's when the design side of the field finally clicked in my head and I realized, oh, this would be fun to do. That's a lot of tough classes--and a lot of not knowing--up front, though!) Skippy asked me what part of the trail I've enjoyed the most so far and I said the desert and she replied, oh, I haven't met anyone who's said that yet. Because she enjoyed the desert most as well. I think because she saw so many interesting rock formations, and got to speculate on so many geological processes. There were these rocks that she found on the trail that she even considered packing out they were so fascinating, but alas, the weight and the inconvenience. She is also planning to do the skip up to Dunsmuir, but is doing it via public transportation: a Grayhound from Truckee to Sacramento at 11am, then an Amtrak from Sacramento to Dunsmuir at 12:35am. 12:35, I said, is the bus going to arrive in Sacramento in time? 12:35am, she repeated, after midnight. Oh, I said. Yeah, she said, she had some college friends in Oakland who were actually going to drive out to Sacramento today to meet up with her, hang out for the afternoon at the train station (or somewhere else: Sacramento isn't a small town). But Skippy was pretty cool: while she may not have career plans beyond a vague concept of grad school, she does plan to do the CDT next year, and then finish off with the AT sometime in the future (she's not really looking forward to that one, it seems--I think she prefers the wildness aspect of the trail to the social aspect). That's pretty ambitious, but I will say she has her priorities straight: Triple Crown first, career, eh, that can be figured out!
-- Shutterbug, a friend of Double Snacks, provided the rides both from Sierra City to Truckee, and from Truckee to Dunsmuir, so much thanks to him! Shutterbug is doing a masters degree at Harvard Divinity--with an emphasis in wilderness (or something like this: he had an official term for this but it went by so fast I didn't manage to catch it)--and evidently this is his second? Anyway, Shutterbug is one of those folks who speaks in fully complete sentences, no wiggle words, and fully formed thoughts each time, which makes him sound incredibly erudite. Which is appropriate: he is! He also lived in Vermont for a while, so we talked about that some. I mostly talked about being born there, and how there weren't that many Chinese folks in Vermont at the time. And evidently that's still larger true, except for about a 15-mile radius around Burlington, where--due to the university, the medical center, and the was-IBM-now-is-Global-Foundries facility--is actually pretty diverse. (One of these days I should probably go back and visit there.) Shutterbug is also a landscape photographer--hence the trail name--and carries this massive, beautiful camera. And according to Double Snacks, takes beautiful shots! So besides being a really nice guy shuttling around hikers, and being tremendously intelligent, evidently he also has a great eye!
-- A quick note on calculations. So for many late nights in the Sierras and around Tahoe, Dylan and I would discuss our pace, and how if we continued at the current, we wouldn't make it to Canada in time. And Dylan would mention this to Uno, and Uno would counter that it's fine, we don't need to speed up, because there will be fire closures. And Dylan--and me too--wouldn't be convinced by this argument. And I think this is the result of being an engineer. WIthout the fire closure a solid reality--a definite closure with a definite skip of a definite number of miles--with it still speculatory, we don't feel comfortable depending on it. Yes, we know that in all probability it will occur, but without that probability being confirmed, and without a number, we can't rely on it in planning. So it's as if it isn't there. This happened to me in grad school: we would plan out a couple years, then see that with just that, we're not going to make it in time, so then pencil in "then a miracle occurs". Only it rarely does, and you're just left with unreasonable schedules at the end. That's the sort of thing that I, at least, am trying to forestall when I ignored the possibility of fire closures back then. Now, of course, the "miracle" (bad word for it) has occured, there *are* fire closures, and we *are* skipping, so now I can incorporate that into the calculations but, before confirmation, I just couldn't, regardless of how firmly I believed fire closures would happen: it's just an engineer thing.
-- Today I met Sock Monkey and Ranger Danger, a retired couple (who retired only a couple weeks before hitting the trail) who were the other two folks in the Shutterbug Shuttle. Of the two, Sock Monkey is the more talkative, in fact, she got to reading old entries of this blog even as I was sitting there in the car, and asking questions, which was very natural and understandable--the writer's sitting right here--but also very strange and awkward. Not sure why, but it was. Sock Monkey has this massive scar that's healing on one knee. The story is she had tripped on Donohue pass and fell and scrapped her knee, but this happens so she didn't think much of it. And so before she looked she asked Ranger Danger how it looked and he said, well, not good. Because there was a flap of meat hanging down--this had been a deep cut. So they washed it out as best they could, then went to the ER when they got into Mammoth. And the ER doctor had looked at it, and continued picking out little rocks and whatnot, and then said, well, there are two things I can do. I can stitch it up, but if you keep hiking you'll pop the stitches. Or we can give you antibiotics and patch it up as best we can to keep it clean, and you can keep hiking but you'll have a scar. And Sock Monkey was like, well, if I keep hiking I get to keep moving and also have a badass scar? So they're still out here! And Sock Monkey named the scar "Donohue"!
-- Ranger Danger I got to talk to some on trail. Turns out he was also a geology major, and after college he went to work in industry (rather than academia) for the oil and now-energy-exploration companies. Which now are transitioning again to carbon sequestration--in fact, the company he'd just left had put all their eggs in the carbon sequestration basket. (It's just really expensive to do right now, although Ranger Danger believes that it's a technological limitation, so with more money and resources poured into it, it'll become cheaper.) But I also got to pick his brain about some career things, like what he thought about transitioning from the line to more of a leadership role. And he conceded that there will always be a push for that. And he said he found the leadership role was less fun--he lost all the science and interesting stuff, and replaced it with managing kindergardeners--but the pay was much better. And as he was putting three kids through college (and those were Duke, Harvard, and an out-of-state University of Florida to boot), the better pay was a very real thing!
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