Day 147: Mile 2344.1 - 2366.0

There's the illusion of the tent in the morning: every morning when I wake, the illumination of the inside of the tent suggests gray skies and cold weather outside. In reality, it hasn't been that: usually it's been blue skies and--ok, the cold weather is true. This morning was the closest though: I woke in the middle of tall forest where the sun could just barely navigate between all the trunks, so the sky wasn't gray, but brown.

Today the trail was a lot of up and down, up and down. In fact, it seemed to eschew flat like the plague, and relish up and down, up and down. And the half the time the up was steep enough that I had to intentionally take a breath, slow down, and take it ponderous and pushed. By route, the trail was likely the same as the shelf-ridge-saddle trail of yesterday, only today the trail was always wooded--often open-vaulted, but sometimes close-vaulted--and that gives a very different feel. Enough so that I forget that it's a shelf-ridge-saddle type of trail, and just put my head down and hike. And you would think that would make for good mileage but I think the hiking here is tougher, and I'm still taking longer breaks, so in the end, I feel like I'm hiking for a lot longer and not gaining as many miles for the effort.

But even with a greenish tunnel, and head down hiking, there were some highlights on the day.

1) In the morning, I passed by the Mike Urich cabin and stopped to get some water (there was little water today: just 3 sources, really, over this whole 20+ mile stretch). This is a nice little cabin for snowmobilers (it seems), but PCTers can use it in the summertime. Just a sturdy wood cabin, with some gear inside (it looked like someone was staying there, although I saw no one--maybe they were out for the day), and a PCT trail register which I went ahead and signed. (And saw that folks I knew, like Double Snacks, had been there basically a week ahead!) Oh, and on the outside of the cabin there was mounted this poem:

The mountain gods from seats on high

Rejoiced to see Mike Urich Die

And at his death gave this decree

"To all who pass here, know that we

Entrust to Big Mike Urich's hands

These camps, these trails, these forest lands

To rule, protect, to love and scan

Well as he did while mortal man.

And deal out sentence stern and just

On those who violate his trust"

Stranger, beware, leave not a fire --

Foul not Mike's camp, rouse not his ire!  

Which I rather liked: it rhymes, but still has a bit of that off-canter rhythm which causes phrases to finish on the next line. But the real interesting thing about the cabin was standing on its porch and looking out over the meadow, and seeing the sky. And realizing, I had forgotten about sky shots.

Because when I first started photography, there were three types of shots I came up doing: flower shots, sky shots, and tree shots. And I learned so much from them: flower shots ultimately taught me to pay attention to the background (flowers are almost always pretty--that's their nature--so what distinguishes a good flower shot isn't the flower, but what's *around* the flower); sky shots taught me tricks of exposure (adjust the exposure and sky shots will pop) and shape-in-context (clouds are interesting shapes, but shooting just the cloud shape isn't as interesting as shooting the cloud shape in the context of something else); and tree shots. Well tree shots I never could quite figure out--that's probably why I worked on them so much! But sky shots: I hadn't done sky shots in quite some time, but in that meadow I first started noticing the sky and clouds again. Nothing interesting enough to shoot, but it was *there*.

2) At 11:14am I passed a gravel-y road that happened to be at more of a saddle in the mountains so I could get a wider view, and I suddenly got that southern California day-hike feel of, I wonder where that goes? And I thought, well, I'll just have to plan another route and find out next week!

3) After lunch, the trail passes through a burn zone from a fire in the 1980s. Still recovering--mostly low brush and dead white trunks, and some smaller conifers starting to grow. But the colors! The leaves of the brush turning blood red and burnt ochre, some going even fallow yellow; the trunks dessicated white above and charcoal black below; but through it all, the revitalizing green of the new, young trees, and even the bursting white of a smattering of flowers. And behind, Mount Rainier, today unoccluded by cloud, its slopes near blue in the distance. The scene was utterly devastating, and astoundingly beautiful. (And it wasn't beautiful because of regrowth and the return-of-life or somesuch, but that's not it: it's the Destruction itself--with his ponytail and little knapsack thrown over his shoulder, singing improvised tunes that are always off-key--that's beautiful.)

4) And finally, towards the end of the day when the view would open up between the trees, I would gaze out north and see the jagged ridge line of the northern Cascades. Yesterday I had seen the skyline in the sunset, but today I saw more: I could start to see details, the slivers of gray and white cliffs, the sharp lines and steep faces, and I thought to myself, are you kidding me? We're going to go over *that*? And it *was* scary, but I guess that's just the way it is!

And that was the hike!

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Some notes:

-- Louisiana Saddle > Mike Urich Cabin > Seasonal Stream > Tacoma Pass > Overgrown Road

-- Today I talked to Grant, who I actually met back at Panther Creek about 10 days ago. Grant lived and worked in Hood River (which is just east of Cascade Locks) for 40+ years, and when he retired a couple years ago, finally got into the outdoors and started hiking. And it was a revelation. This is all right here, and this is all so beautiful! And he got to watching YouTube, and saw the PCT videos, and thought, hey, I can do that, and so last year, on a near whim, section hiked through Oregon. And this year it's Washington. He plans to do the all the sections, although was considering skipping the desert. (I expoused the beauty of the desert for a while, though, and maybe convinced him to at least give it a shot!)

-- And I talked to Grant at two water sources on the day--at Mike Urich's cabin and at the stream about 5 miles down the trail from there--and some more afterward. And we talked about the usual trail things: about Guthooks features, and gear, and whatnot. But we also talked a bit about his finding the beauty of nature around where he's at, in Hood River. He had flown over all this all the time, but to actually walk it, it was just stunning. And, like me, he was amazed that it was right here!

-- And there's another thing, too: he noticed the perspective that being out here brings. And I remember talking with Double Snacks about this, about how in normal life we have the concerns of the office, and of family, and more besides, and how those come to dominate everything we think of. But come out here--even on just my Saturday hikes--and you get another view, a view where things are bigger than you, where things don't care so much about you (nature really doesn't care about you--it doesn't have to, you're a part of it already, whether you like it or not!), where your worries are about getting lost or getting hurt or running out of water, and that grants a wider perspective. It's not to say that the concerns of office or family aren't important--they are, especially those of family--but when you realize there are other, bigger things out there as well, they just don't necessarily feel as urgent. And that makes a difference: I think it's why, on the job, whenever something went wrong with the chip in the lab I would always say, ok, let's take a look, and not get bothered or panicked about it, but be able to calmly work my way through it. Is it important, yes, very much so, but there are also other things that are important too, and in that context, it's not as urgent.

-- Anyway, Grant worked mostly as a pilot, but did do some volunteer police work when one of the deputies was out on sick leave (had been in a chase and hit a horse, which came through the windshield). And when I said I was based out of Orange County he said, oh, that's a tough place. Because he had a friend who wanted to make more money, and went to do police work in Orange County. And his friend said he pulled his gun every day, whereas Grant said in all his volunteer police work, he pulled his gun maybe 6 times, and each time he thought, wait, we're pulling out our guns here? So Orange County to him is a tough town with lots of police work to be done. And that's the small town perspective for you: Irvine is actually, statistically, one of the safest towns in America, but compared to Hood River, yeah, it's probably a cesspool of troublemakers and deviants!

-- But yes, I met Grant first back at Panther Creek, where he stopped to camp and I pushed on, up the hill, for another 6 miles. But he caught up!: here we are, 10 days later, nonetheless at the same spot, even though he hikes slower (he's not got a thru-hiker's trail legs yet). And, to be fair, we've been leapfrogging since: I saw him again at White Pass, for example. And the reason he's able to keep up, I think, is that he doesn't stop: he didn't stop in Trout Lake (instead got resupplied by his wife at the road), and his turnaround at White Pass was faster than mine. So while I may be faster on the trail--he's targeting less than 20 miles a day, I'm targeting more--at town he's ultimately more efficient, and evidently that makes enough difference!

-- And, yes, I'm continuing to push the mileage, albeit with limited success. This part of the PCT--from White Pass to Snoqualamie Pass--is supposed to be harder than the part from Cascade Locks to White Pass: it's supposed to have more elevation gain and be steeper. I don't know if that's objectively true, but it sure feels that way: to get in my 20+ miles, I'm hiking into the dark these days. But I'm pushing anyway because the weather is good, and while the weather is good I want to be hiking as much as I can. Partly because I know the weather will eventually turn bad and I want to be as far along as possible before that starts. But partly this is a repeat of the false-dichotomy realization in the Sierras: I want to *see* *things*, and by covering more miles each day I get to *see* *more* *things*. But, yes, the current plan is to push so that I can get to Snoqualamie Pass early enough that I can charge, then leave later that afternoon. That'll give me a leg up in the Snoqualamie Pass to Stevens Pass--which (again) is supposed to be even harder than *this* stretch--and at Stevens Pass I plan to take my (currently lone) zero in Washington.

-- Camping cohort: none, out here by my lonesome! This is an old abandoned road, since overgrown, and through a little shade of low-branched trees there's an open spot highlighted by two torn pieces of trunk-wood that look suspiciously like benches. So I set up here, even though I'm camping on some groundcover--they look like strawberry vines?--rather than bare mineral soil. I could have camped about a mile back, at the Tacoma Pass, but decided to push on and get the extra mile. Paid for it by having to climb a steep hill to get here, so arrived soaked in sweat with the sun now down--it's going to be fun getting back into those clothes tomorrow morning in the cold!--but it's a fine enough spot. Halfway through dinner another hiker came along, checked out the road on the other side of the trail for a while, ultimately decided it wasn't for them, continued on, their headlamp a little low star bobbing along.