Day 104: Mile 1552.8 - 1573.8

And this morning I did sleep in, well enough to garner myself a 99 body battery according to my Garmin watch (at night, the body battery measures how well you sleep; 100 is the max). But for my indulgence, I also woke to a crick in my neck, so you see, nothing comes for free!

The plan today was to do just 21 miles: the road to Etna (the next town) is 47 miles away, and the last campground before the road is 41 miles away. So splitting the 41 miles over two days (because we can't make it in a single day), we're planning to do 21 today and 20 tomorrow. So two shorter days followed by (hopefully) an early entrance into Etna.

Given the shorter day, in the morning we left later. We didn't coordinate, but Double Snacks and I ended up leaving at the same time. Only whereas I'm slow on trail in the morning--it takes me a while to get the engine running--she takes off and quickly disappeared. I wouldn't see her until the first water source, about 5 miles away, where I stopped at a log with a little itty-bitty trickle going underneath it, and goose-necked my CNOC too many times to counter to gather a simple 1 L. Then walked all of less than 20 yards down the trail only to find Double Snacks parked at a far superior water source, with tremendous flow, munching away at breakfast. She hadn't even *seen* the previous water source to even think of getting water from it. sigh. Well at least at that source, as I was filtered I wandered downstream a bit, then turned around to see a deer not more than 30 yards uphill. It turned and looked at me, I gave it a stationary wave, and it went back to grazing while I continued filtering. Eventually I trudged back uphill and upstream to my pack, and all the while the deer kept munching away, until I put my bag back together and left, at which point it jerked its head up and looked at me again. I motioned to the water--I thought it was waiting for me to finish to get a drink--then headed down the trail for 20 yards before bumping into the better water and Double Snacks. The deer was largely undeterred, though: even from the superior water source, we could look back and see it, still grazing away, without a care in the world. Oh to be like the deer! Or rather: do you not see the birds of the air?

After rejoining Double Snacks at the water source, we hiked together down to Highway 3, where we took a short rest before beginning the climb of the day. This was a long climb up from the highway into the woods, and Double Snacks wanted to grab some calories, drink some water, and rest a bit in preparation. Which only made the climb loom larger and larger in my mind. In the end, it wasn't bad: a long climb (almost 4 miles) but mostly gradual enough to be an infinite incline (if only I had slowed a little, but I was impatient), mostly through the woods so shaded, and when not shaded but in open territory, breezy so still cool. It took a while, but I reached the top and proceeded down the other side to the water source we had agreed to lunch at down at the bottom.

And I got there, and put my pack down, and laid out my solar panel, and was getting water, when Double Snacks came up. (We tend to split on climbs, where I tend to be a bit faster.) She had looked on Guthooks, and the *next* water source looked even *better*--it mentioned having pools large enough to soak your feet--so I gathered up my stuff and moved on. And reached another creek, and put my pack down, and was reaching for my solar panel, when Double Snacks came up and said, only 0.2 miles to go! Whoops, wrong source! (Although this one had more cool pitcher plants, so I had an excuse!) And so I gathered up my stuff and moved on and now, with Double Snacks in the lead, we finally stopped at the right water source--the Mosquito Lake Outlet--and this was indeed a much better source, shaded, with water tumbling rather than trickling, and large pools to soak your feet as the pond skippers danced on the surface just above your toes. (Oh, and no mosquitos, name notwithstanding.) It looks like I still have the southern California penchant for finding water: I expect none so anytime I see any I think, well, this must be it! Luckily, Double Snacks is more astute. So we stopped--finally--and soaked, and I laid out my solar panel, and I dried out my tent's rain fly (condensation in the evening), and we ate a relaxed lunch.

And after the relaxed lunch, I dug a relaxed cathole, and then got back on the trail and found myself a bit *too* relaxed: in the heat of the now mid-afternoon, it took a while to regain momentum on the climbs. But I eventually did, and followed the trail as it contined around the peaks of Trinity Alps (I swear the trail here basically circles Trinity Alps, giving you a near 360-degree view of the peaks!), climbing up again until it reached the red rock section. 

Up to this point the woods had been fine but, to me at least, unimpressive. I felt that I had seen this all before, and while seeing hillside after hillside after hillside of it stretching from here to the horizon was cool, walking through it all did not inspire a tremendous amount of attention. So while walking the trail I thought about other things, this time, mostly about ADPLLs and possible problems with the feedforward TDC architecture (if you implement it by rotating the reference through the TDC itself, isn't that just a pain to build?, and if you implement it by delaying the firing of the TDC, aren't you just rendering every channel a near-integer channel, infecting all channels with limit-cycle problems?), and even exploring the elusive "2nd order ADPLL" idea. (Some ideas here, but the 2nd order ADPLL is so elusive, and its promise so extraordinary, that I'm hesitant to count any chickens before they hatch.) And that looked fit to continue, at least on the flat or downhill sections (think?, who can think and climb at the same time?!). But then we came to the red rock section and that all changed.

Because the red rock section was amazing. Trinity Alps is a section of gray granite, reminiscent of the Sierras (in fact, Double Snacks was saying that she had read that they were part of the Sierras that somehow split and migrated hundreds of miles north), their striking peaks tucked in the middle of mountains of forested slopes. But then, off to one side, there's suddenly something completely different: jagged rock formations, seemingly chiseled out from the mountain by an artist in love with jagged, jutting cuts, the detritus of the carving left as loose scree all down the mountainside. And all of it of red red rock. It was incredible: it reminded me of the desert, not only with its strange and magnificent shapes, but with the fact that here was seemingly a whole other biome, a break from tree and slope to boulder and scree, a transition from brown and green to the external red and internal blue-gray of the rock. An astonishing change. It was fun to walk through, and I just wished it could have lasted longer, or that I had had the time to wander it more slowly.

After that, it was just a bit more to the campsite at mile 21, although it took us a while. I think it was a combination of the heat (strange that the day before yesterday was hot, yesterday we got raind on, and today is hot again), relaxing a bit too long for lunch, and the fact that 21 miles is short, so the brain--perhaps subconsciously--ratchets back the energy. But we plugged on, slowly, and eventually reached the campsite, which turned out to be another campsite with a great sunset view (we've been blessed with campsites with great sunset views the past couple nights), ate dinner, and called it a day.

And that was the hike! A day which started out with me amusing myself with ADPLL speculations to cut through the boredom, then suddenly being happily surprised by the red rock section and (almost) being profoundly moved by the different stone structures, and ending with just 21 miles on the day. But a good day, and one where I started to recover out of the sameness of the woods and started to hope for interesting views--and the awe that comes with them--yet again.

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Some notes:

-- Campsite > Cow Pasture > Highway 3 > Mosquito Lake Outlet > Eagle Peak Spring > Campsite

-- Yesterday we had camped with Rocky and Survivor, and today Double Snacks spectulated that maybe Survivor was "John Goes Places aka Survivor" on Guthooks. In which case, we had camped with a celebrity!--a Guthooks celebrity, but a celebrity nonetheless! John Goes Places comments on pretty much every water source as he passes, so his comments are pretty invaluable. I remember Twilight, back in Sierra City, commenting that since we skipped ahead, we would now be on par with folks like John Goes Places, and then how were we going to get our forward intel on water now? Well, the answer is that we might be on par for a night, but John Goes Places is *fast*--as I was leaving he had just gotten up, but a couple hours later he was passing me on the trail--so I think we'll be alright!

-- Lots of conversation with Double Snacks both on the trail a bit, and mostly at dinner. Some of the more interesting bits:

* Which is harder, the trail or grad school? We both agreed: grad school. And for me, the reason is that "contribution to knowledge" clause in getting your PhD: you have to make one. Which means you have to come up with an idea that nobody else has. This is hard to do in the first place, but once you have your idea, you spend the next couple years proving it out. But then that means for the next couple years every time you open up the latest publication of, say, the Red Book (i.e., the Journal of Solid-State Circuits, the gold standard in publishing integrated circuit papers), you do so with more than a little trepidation. I mean, my idea isn't *that* novel: what if someone has already published it? Then what am I going to do? Flush away the last 3-4 years of work? Just living in that uncertainty: first in trying to come up with an idea nobody else has, then not knowing if your idea is going to work (or how well it's going to work), and on top of that always being worried that someone else has thought up the same and will beat you to publication, that uncertainty is something you don't have to face on trail. On trail, the way to go is always obvious--you came from *that* way, so you're going *that* way--it's straightforward. In research, the way you're going, whether it's the right way or will ultimately turn out to be the wrong way, you don't know and won't know until a few years down the line!

* We talked about hiker hunger, and how both of us are pretty lucky that, after being in town for one day and eating like crazy, the next day the hunger is less. Whereas for some folks the crazy hunger lasts for multiple days. The hunger dying away suggests we're not that badly in caloric deficit, and also gives hope that, after the trail, we won't balloon in weight either!

* We both are carrying too much food though: more than we can finish before we get to Etna! Ah well, eyes being bigger than stomachs! But as I say, having too much food is a "good" problem: you can literally eat your way out of your problems!

* Speaking of hope, as a bit of a wry joke I brought up the "Oregon Challenge": doing Oregon in two weeks. But Double Snacks countered (perhaps she didn't get that I was joking, which is fair) that she doesn't know why people rush through Oregon: Oregon is really nice. There was a spot, she mentioned, where you're looking out on these volcanic peaks, with old lava flows underneath, and--not the words she used but the tone of her voice when she said them--it sounded magnificent. Which inspired a certain hope in me that the trail will once again start dazzling, as it did in the desert for me. Don't know, for some reason woods after woods after woods, and of these higher elevation woods which aren't as deep and dark, isn't as appealing to me. (Woods that are so dense it becomes positively spooky--like the ones we camped at the first night out from Truckee--*those* woods *are* appealing to me. As I told Double Snacks, who's listening to the Lord of the Rings audiobook, those spooky woods are the ones Tolkien writes about, those are the Old Man Willows, the Fangorns, the Mirkwoods!)