Day 116: Mile 1740.0 - 1763.3

One of the problems with town is that I always invariably end up getting little sleep. This was true in Ashland--the first night I slept at midnight, the second at 1am, always cranking out blog entries until late. So when I got into camp last night, I got about half of that day's entry done before I just fell asleep, with my glasses still on and my headlamp still shining. And slept. And slept. I woke late, then went back to the keyboard and wrote for another hour and a half or so, then broke camp. Upshot: late start, around 9am again. Well, nuts: I had wanted to get going around 7am. But at least I was up-to-date on all my writing! It's a good feeling for as long as it lasts.

Which is until the end of the today (if not sooner because I remember to add something to an older entry) but you take what you can get!

As for the hiking today: another day of rolling hills through the woods. The ups and downs weren't bad--nothing severe, everything infinite incline-able--but the scenery was woods, woods, and more woods. Every now and then the woods would break into these little meadows, but the meadows were small and didn't afford any views before quickly going back into woods, woods, and more woods. Oh, and roads: crossed so many roads today. Dirt roads, but also gravel roads, paved roads, even road intersections! It seemed I crossed a road of some variety at least every half hour! Where all these roads go I don't know, I didn't even bother to look down most of them except to check for traffic, just crossed and continued moving.

Because that's what today was mostly about: moving. I know that yesterday I had speculated about learning to enjoy the woods by learning to appreciate the subtle differences between different types of woods. Yeah, did none of that today. Instead did my equivalent of putting on headphones: got a technical problem in my craw and chewed on it all day. In this case: the mathematics behind the acoustic beamforming Dan Chikami wanted some help on, mostly deciding to formulate it using an ipart+fpart decomposition for all the phases/distances (phase and distance are the same thing, assuming wave speed is constant). Which is the same decomposition used in ADPLLs; that's likely where I got the idea. Anyway, that ruminated in the brain for pretty much the whole morning, then bled over into a lot of the afternoon as well. It would have consumed all the afternoon, but there happened to be a hill in the afternoon, with a bunch of downed trees, and climbs and tree puzzles consume the mind enough that other thought doesn't get any bandwidth.

But honestly, if there was a day to not see the scenery, this would be a fine one: it was just woods all day, no big views, and the sky was gray with smoke and ochre with light pretty much all day too. (At some times, if you wanted it real bad, the sky could maybe hint at blue. But odds were low.)

And that was the hike. I will say that, on the beamforming thinking, I did get to round 2. Round 1 is the initial formulation, but round 1 invariably has problems. Usually I don't figure out those problems until I sit down to work out the details and realize, oh wait, my round 1 ideas don't actually work, and that forces round 2. (Ah, but that's the optimism of the trail for you: on the move you're sure you got it, just some details to hammer out, but when you look at it in quiet and stillness at your desk you realize, oh, my thinking had some fundamental limitations and, no, I don't got it, not at all. Hence: round 2!) Only today, I had enough time that I figured out the round 1 errors on trail, and began round 2 on trail. This is good for the beamforming problem, but bad for the trail: it shows just how boring the trail was today!

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Some notes:

-- Campsite > Little Hyatt Reservoir > Klum Landing Camp > Burton Flat Road > Dead Indian Road > South Brown Mountain Shelter

-- I bumped into Gutfish today: I was coming out of the Klum Landing Campground, while he was headed in. We spoke briefly, mostly a, hey, how's it going! It's been a long time! I asked him about the schedule, and he said it was going great: we're about three days ahead of schedule for October 1. Right now he's pushing for 21 miles/day for the next 11 days to reach Mile 1984, meet up with his girlfriend, and head into Bend, but he's worried about his feet. They hurt a lot more than usual, and 11 continuous days: that's a lot of pounding on the feet! Do your feet hurt, he asked, and I said, yeah, they do, every day. He seemed reassured by this. What I failed to mention--didn't think to until a ways down the trail--was that I also take 4 tablets of ibuprofen every night to help suppress inflammation and hopefully let my feet heal up better when I'm asleep. The habit started back when I was having trouble sleeping due to the rib injury, and I've kept it ever since, although now it's no longer about pain, but inflammation and recovery. (Hence the *higher* dose: I use 2 tablets of ibuprofen for pain, but 4 tablets for inflammation, mostly based on a nurse's advice back when I was in graduate school. Take 800 mg she had said and I had done a quick calculation. That's 4 pills!, I had countered. Yeah, she said, you need that much to get the anti-inflammatory effect. I don't remember why I was talking to the nurse--don't remember the injury--but I do remember the dosage!) I don't know if the ibuprofen is a good idea, but it seems to help my feet, and I take it after dinner so there's plenty of food in the stomach, and it'll only be for another 2 months, so ah hose it, I'm doing it!

-- I keep getting passed by SOBO hikers these days and I must say: they look good. They all seem to be multi-colored in their dress. My outfit is a simple green (shirt), yellow (bandana), and orange (backpack); Double Snacks' was a simple white (shirt), gray (pants), and blue (backpack); Dylan's was a simple blue (outfit), beige (hat), and white (backpack) with yellow (sleeping pad). But I feel so many of the SOBO folks have that many colors--if not more--just on the legs of their shorts! Anyway, besides the colorful outfits, they're also hiking pretty strong; certainly, they seem much stronger than me. Jailbreak would point out that this is selection bias: I'm seeing the SOBO frontrunners, so of course these are the faster folks. Still, it is a bit intimidating!

-- Oh, and besides gray skies and ochre light, it's also been pretty warm, and positively hot at times. Usually there's a breeze to cool things off, but I remember the shuttle driver mentioning that I was getting out of Ashland just in time: it was supposed to hit 106 (or something similarly ridiculous) by Wednesday. I won't be there for that; I'll be up in the cooler mountains instead. Sure, but I worry that such hot temps in the valleys translates to thunderstorms in the mountains--that's what happens in the Sierras, for example--and thunderstorms are no fun, both because they start fires, and because I'm not a fan of rain when thru-hiking.

-- I tried charging my inReach via solar panel at lunch today, and got nothing. Or more specifically: the charge seemed as fast as the drain, so the battery percentage on my inReach didn't change. I'm not sure if this is due to reduced luminance due to the smoke, or perhaps frequency shift: the somke passes orange sunlight better than yellow, and I wonder if the panel's frequency response might be tuned to the yellow. Either way, whether by luminance or frequency, the solar panel doesn't look to be charging things as long as there's smoke in the air. Which is bad: it means I'll have to start charging my camera and inReach from my battery, which means less battery for my phone. I hadn't worried about charging since getting the panel but maybe I'll need to start budgeting for that again.

-- So I camped tonight at the South Brown Mountain Shelter, a little one-room shelter just a few minutes off trail. And there I met Almost Famous and Moonbeam and Wetfoot and Daddy-O and a couple of section hikers, eating dinner at the picnic table they have there. And as I came up, they greeted me, and Almost Famous said, hey, I have a trail name for you! And evidently he had workshopped it with some folks, and they all felt it was good. So his proposal?: Scribe. Partially because I'm always taking notes in my pad (an old habit from my day-hiking), and partially because of this blog. And I must admit, that's not a bad trail name; probably the best one yet. And as Almost Famous pointed out, very neutral, carries very little baggage. The only complaint I might have is that it might sound a bit pretentious, but that's probably just my own personal hangup. Honestly, I would adopt it, except that it's been so many miles that if you started talking about "Scribe", nobody would know who you're talking about! Not that anybody knows who I am anyway, but those like *two* people, *they* would be confused!

-- Oh, and I've mentioned it many times: there's a reason that I tended to shy away from trail names. I remember back at the beginning of the trail, just after Warner Springs and heading towards Mike's Place, I spent a day hiking with Patricia, an older lady who's back is bent even before she put her pack on! But here she was, section-hiking the PCT. Anyway, someone asked her, do you have a trail name? No, she said, why would I want to remember two names? Just the way she scoffed at the idea of trail names, I thought it as hilarious as it was true! But there's another reason I've tended to be critical of a possible trail name: it's a matter of identity. So there's a sort of syndrome that used to happen at church retreats when I was younger. I would go on these retreats, and faith would become immensely important, but then I'd come down the mountain and all those revelations and dedications would fade away oh so quickly. And I considered this a matter of identity: there was the me up on the mountain, and the me back in the valley, and they were different. And that wasn't good. And to my mind, a trail name would tend to do the same. I don't take a trail name because the person I am on trail?: I *want* to be that person when I'm off the trail. That person who looks at people with Gatsby's smile?: I want to be that person in "real life" too. So, yeah, I'm just charlie, and just as I'm charlie in real life, I'm charlie on the trail, and there isn't, and shouldn't, be two identities. Which is to say: the person who's on the trail, the person who's learned the lessons and become the better for them, I want to be that person when I get off the trail too. So I keep the same name.

-- That being said, I recognize that a trail name isn't necessariliy a statement of identity: it can also be a statement of story. Like the monikers in old stories--Beren the Empty-Handed comes to mind--in which case the trail name doesn't create that sense of bifurcated identity. I think Splash was that kind of trail name--more story than identity. So likely I'm being too sensitive about this whole trail name thing, and probably should just embrace the fun of it rather than overthinking it, but overthinking things is kind of a primary characteristic of my personality.

-- And, oh, I should mention: today I heard the origin story of Almost Famous's trail name. So he's worked for National Geographic for a while (it seems), traveled a lot, and then last year, he decided that he wanted to try his hand at photo-journalism. And the advice he got was to, well, fake it til you make it. Just get your camera, go to some political rallies, and take pictures. So he did: he found out about a political rally taking place in Washington DC earlier this year on January 6th, and headed out. Took a bunch of pictures, including a lot of a guy with a horned hat that he ended up selling to CNN. So you've probably seen his work but not known it. So, people said, he's not Famous, he's Almost Famous. And his story closes (evidently) mimics that of the film Almost Famous, which is about a guy who claims to be with Rolling Stone (he isn't) to tag along with a band, and has various adventures, but in the end does sell the story to Rolling Stone. (Or so I think: I confess haven't seen the film myself, but this is the synopsis I gathered from the conversation.) So that's a film about fake-it-til-you-make-it, and is also appropriate!