Day 124: Mile 1911.5 - 1934.3

Welcome to the Pacific Northwest!, said Double Snacks this morning as we overlooked a lake that had been clear when we went to sleep just a while ago, but in the morning bright was now surrounded by mist, the trees just across the water occluded and mysterious, the steam rising off the water in lazy vortexes. So while yesterday we had enjoyed a wamr afternoon at Shelter Cove, and had been hiking in the heat, today a cold snap rolled in--evidently a cold front from Washington--and temperatures plummeted to the 40s and 50s all day. In fact, in the morning I was shivering the whole time I was getting my pack together, and it would only stop when I finally got hiking and the blood started flowing and feeling started to return to my fingers.

As the adage says: get up and get hiking!

The trail in this section isn't tough--it goes up and down with a lot of up to start today, but it's a rolling up and down where if it's steep, it's at least a shorter steep. In fact, it's mild enough that some folks were doing the 24-hour Challenge today (that's where you hike for 24 hours straight and see how far you can get). And scenery-wise, today was an all-out green tunnel, with some brief respites when the trail happened to pass by lakes, and one nice long reprieve where it walked through a burn zone. I actually rather liked the burn zone--it was in the afternoon where the sun was fighting to come out (and losing much more than it was winning), but even under overcast skies it looked really pretty to me. Maybe because it reminded me of the desert: I could look out and see distances (even if it was all just burned trees) and could feel like I was making progress, something I don't tend to experience when just walking past tree after tree after tree. But regardless of the reason, the burn zone--with its straight white sticks of trunks jutting perpendicular to the ground, its low green shrubs just starting to reappear, and the delicate purples of fireweed flowers throughout--was pretty fun to walk through! Other than that, there was a section in the morning where the trail descended a hill and the fog rolled in thick--visibility limited to about 20-30 yards or so--the tree trunks being born from the white full wrought, appearing left and right with a subtlety and a suddenness. That was also fun, albeit in a more scary, I-hope-this-breaks-on-the-other-side sort of way, because otherwise it was going to be a *very* cold day.

And I will say this: I don't do well in the cold. I tend to shut down; when I ran into Daddy-O later in the day, he actually straight up asked me if something was wrong. Are you doing all right? Well, nothing was wrong per se, I was just shut down from the cold, probably looking glum, certainly not being very communicative or otherwise engaging. This is likely something I should work on if this cold persists--need to adapt and become more resilient--but I suspect this is also one of those things you can't really force.

But at least today was just cold, and not wet! Overcast, except for a brief period in the burn zone (where, amazingly, I managed to get my rain fly out and over a rock to dry--it had drizzled last night, so it was pretty wet in the morning), and occasionally windy, but the most precipitation I saw were the wet-shadows of big drops scattered across the dry dust of the trail. As for the rest of the ledger: there was one good thing, and one bad thing today.

The bad thing is that my left ankle started acting up again. It started in the morning, and by midday it was feeling pretty strained pretty consistently. After the break at midday, though, it felt much better and was pretty pain-free for the first half of the afternoon. By late afternoon, though, it was starting to feel loaded again. Hence my opting for a relatively short day today: just to Jezebel Lake. Double Snacks had originally proposed to go all the way to a pond about 5 miles further down the trail from here--for a one-day total of over 26 miles!--and I had originally agreed, but when the ankle started complaining I decided to ratchet down the miles to only 22 and change. (Double Snacks is actually pushing today: she wants to get into Elk Lake tomorrow so she can finally take a shower!) By the end of today, the ankle isn't healed by any means--it'll take a solid day of rest for that--but I also don't think I've worked it past the brink either, so if I can baby it tomorrow with lesser mile-counts, then I will.

The good thing was trail magic at Charlton Lake today! It turns out the trail passes close to not only the lake, but also the parking lot that the locals use to visit the lake. And two folks--Sparkles (the Aunt), and Hannah (the Niece)--had decided to set up shop and cook food for hikers. And by cook, I mean cook: they had two gas stoves going and were making grill-cheese sandwiches, pancakes, eggs--eggs!. I eventually got 3 eggs, 2 chocolate chip pancakes, and a cup of hot water (mostly just so I could cup it my hands to warm up some), multiple servings from a big bag of Ruffles potato chips, and then cookies--one sugar cookie homemade from Hannah, a chocloate chip cookie from the store, and a white macademia nut cookie also from the grovery store. Anyway, Sparkles had done the trail back in 2016, had gotten as far as Shasta before a stress fracture in her pelvis forced her off. She plans to return to the trail next year, start where she left off and finish it. Hannah hasn't done the trail, but aspires to do it someday. Anyway, the trail magic was simply amazing: basically a short-order breakfast right on trail, and the two of them more than willing to cook up whatever they had. (In fact, they kept asking, do you guys want something else to eat?, just let us know!) They were both super nice, super accomodating, with a full setup and a whole process--it was amazing. And I think the cooked, real food--rather than some cold or rehydrated trail food--helped: my ankle felt better afterwards, and I think the real food was a contributor to that. But the trail magic, completely unexpected, was a godsend, especially on a day like today where I taken off-guard by the sudden cold snap, and having a pretty rough time of it to boot! A bit of comfort--even if I was sitting there and shivering--goes as long way out here on a day like this, and I was very appreciative!

And that was the hike! Not much to say, in fact, if it wasn't for the sudden cold, there really would *be* nothing to say--green tunnels tend to do that! The forecast says that tomorrow will be a bit warmer--still cold and I'll still be freezing--but it should be warmer by 8 degrees or so; hopefully I won't be seeing my breath *all* *day*. Well, I'm certainly looking forward to it!

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Some notes:

-- Middle Rosary Lake > North Rosary Lake > Bobby Lake Junction > Charlton Lake > Taylor Lake > Irish Lake > Brahma Lake > Jezebel Lake

-- Today I leapfrogged a bit with Restart, who we had met a few days ago, and saw that she was walking *barefoot* down the trail. And when someone asked, she said she had done it before and found she missed it, so she was doing it again here today. And that wetter trails were actually better for this sort of thing, so a foggy day that rendered the soils all a bit damp worked out pretty well. So Dylan, if you're reading this (and you likely aren't): if you come to hike in Oregon, it turns out you can work on Hobbit feet *all* *day* *long*.

-- Incidentally, Restart got her name because she started in Tehachapi, and heading out carried 2 L of water capacity. *Capacity*. Out of Tehachapi it's 15 miles to the first water, and the beginning is a 6-mile climb up a mountain in the desert! So, yeah, pretty quickly she turned around and headed back to Tehachapi to up her water capacity!

-- At the trail magic, Wild--who camped in the same place that Double Snacks and I did last night--mentioned that last night a mouse had chewed into his tent, chewed into his food bag, and made off with the trail mix. Evidently you could see a line of nuts and dried fruits to the hole in the tent. And evidently this is not the first time this has happened, once this happened and the mouse made 3 holes to get out from! Needless to say, this has happened multiple times and by now, evidently there's a *lot* of tenacious tape covering his tent!

-- Wild was also hiking with another guy named Roller, and last night at camp Wild had come up to me and Double Snacks finishing up our dinner, and asked if we had seen Roller. We didn't know Roller, but we also hadn't seen anybody else. Hmm, he must gone further ahead, concluded Wild. Well, it turns out that this morning, when he wakes up, Wild gets out of his tent and there's Roller! Roller had slept right next to him, on the other side of a log, just Roller doesn't have a tent--he cowboy camps--so Wild never saw him. Even though he was *right* *there*!

-- So I'm typing away tonight and from her tent Wetfoot calls out, hey, what is that sound, is that a mouse chewing into my tent? What sound, I reply, then I pause and think, and press the spacebar a bunch of times. You mean this sound?, I ask. Yeah!, she says. That's just my keyboard, I say. Oh, she says, that makes sense, I thought it might be that. That's ok, I'm super chill, you can keep typing. So evidently sometimes typing on this keyboard sounds like rodents chomping away at the walls of your nylon hearth--a disturbing thought indeed!

-- Incidentally, in setting up my own tent tonight, I took a page from Double Snacks' experience last night. She hadn't slept well, and it was because there was a breeze coming off North Rosary Lake and it kept buffetting the side of her tent. If she had to set it up again, she would have rotated it so that the wind blew from head-to-toe, say, rather than side-to-side. So when I pitched my tent tonight, again beside a lake, I oriented my tent so that the wind would blow head-to-toe. The other lesson she learned was to pick even flatter spaces than that one (Double Snacks always tries to get the flattest spots possible to start with), but that's one practice I won't be picking up: I actually like tenting on a slight slant. I feel more comfortable if my sleeping pad is at the bottom of depression of my tent, and I like my head to be slightly higher than the rest of my body too. So slanted ground is kinda my wheelhouse: I just have to oriennt the tent properly on said slanted ground.
-- Oh, one final detail. At the trail magic there was a bench that was just a large plank atop some rocks, but it looked like a bunch of hikers had signed the plank. And I saw Gazelle's name there, with his little gazelle drawing and everything! And that did make me happy, to see that he was still on trail, that he had made it this far. I mean, he was so *fast*--and strong--back in the desert that I have no doubt he'll make it all the way, but just to see something so familiar in the middle of a sudden cold snap, it was a little bit of joy!

-- Today's peanut M&M color was all of them, because Ian has sent a small Ziploc of them with the Shelter Cove resupply, and I ate the whole bag. Hey, it was one of those smaller-than-sandwich Ziplocs and sure it was*full* of M&Ms, but those bags are still pretty small.

-- Camping cohorts tonight: Wejtfoot