Day 6 – July 9, 2014
Odometer Reading: 60.2 miles
Miles today: 8.74
Camped: Crater Creek – elevation 8,676
Today’s Key to Success: Beer
We didn’t sleep again. This time both my knees hurt and Aidan’s right leg was bothering him quite a bit. It seems like every day something new is painful. Every night that new ache and new pain leaks through our dreams and brings us back to the land of the living. We each lay awake, thinking that getting up to get the Vitamin I was too much trouble. Toss, turn, sleep a little more, get up again. Wake the other person up again. Try to stretch it out. Debate obtaining Vitamin I again. Finally obtain Vitamin I. Toss and turn for 20 minutes until it starts working, sleep for a few hours, repeat.
I couldn’t take it any more, so I got up. Did some Yoga in my pajamas while the moon worked its way down over one horizon and the sun worked its way up over the other. Literal Sun Salutations. Then I sat naked on my mat, brushing my hair in the early morning light.
Aidan rolled his head out of the tent and turned his sleepy face toward me. “Hi, what are you doing?”
“Sitting naked on my mat, brushing my hair in the early morning light. What about you?”
“Ug. Last night sucked.” He ran his hands over his face.
“Yeah.”
He dragged himself out of the tent and set about making breakfast. I noticed a hole in the outside pocket of my backpack. I reached in the pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag of granola with a hole in the side. Damn. I can’t believe I didn’t put that in the bear can. We’re usually so careful.
I blamed it on the Ranger. I’d blame anything on the Ranger this morning. My feelings were still raw from yesterday.
We talked again about trying to get up earlier, or at least trying to get out of camp earlier. It’s still taking us two full hours to get ourselves together before we actually start hiking. We’ll do it in one hour and forty-five minutes today for sure, we promised ourselves. Baby Steps.
Two hours later, exactly, we started hiking. I blamed it on the Ranger.
We passed another beautiful lake, the water dropping off to a deep blue five feet from the banks. The mosquitoes hurried us along. We walked next to waterfall after waterfall, the trail clinging to the rocky side of a powerful cliff. We walked gingerly, sometimes getting all the way down on our rear ends to navigate the trail. We put up our umbrellas. The air was hot and dry and stagnant. The Ziploc in my third pocket plastered to my chest with sweat.
Waterfalls, waterfalls, waterfalls.
Other hikers complimented us on our umbrellas. We talked about starting a business hiking around selling umbrellas to people in the wilderness.
More hikers complimented us. Our new business plan was taking shape.
At the bottom, we crossed a bridge, marched up and down the hills on a hot and dusty path for a long time, and finally ended up in a quiet forest.
Hikers complimented my on my Dirty Girl gaiters.
We were starting to feel popular. We high-fived a lot.
We ended up in Agnew Meadows, and after some searching around, we found the bus stop. We were way behind our original schedule since we’d miscalculated miles the other day, and we didn’t have enough food to comfortably get to Red’s Meadow anyway. And there was a bus. And we could justify anything.
I was actually pretty upset that we needed to take a bus. Could we still consider ourselves thru-hikers? Should we come back at the end of the trip and do this extra section if we have time? If we didn’t do it all in a contiguous line, could we still say we hiked the JMT? They always say, HYOH. Hike your own hike. Sure, we could hike it our own way, but could we also say whatever we want about it?
“It’s fine,” Aidan assured me, “of course we can say we hiked the JMT. We are hiking the JMT. Stop agonizing. Besides, we took the bus in Tuolumne Meadows for one mile. We already proved we’re not purists.”
Oh My. Oh No. I’d already ruined it. I’d ruined everything. We weren’t thru-hikers. How did I not think of that when we were in Tuolumne Meadows? We should just go home and try this again next year. He was right. We already blew it. All we could say is that we went backpacking in the area for a few weeks. We couldn’t say we hiked the JMT. That one mile already killed our story. We weren’t true thru-hikers. I’ve always been a purist about things like this, and here I was. A Cheat. But we can justify anything.
The bus pulled up. I got on.
The bus was full. We managed to cram ourselves into the aisle behind the yellow line. The bus driver took off, screaming down hillsides and tearing around corners. I planted my feet and wrapped my arms around the pole rail handle things. I held on for dear life. It was terrifying. The color drained from my face. I looked around at the rest of the people on the bus. They were clean and relaxed. Smiling and pointing out the windows. I looked at the speedometer on the bus. It read 30 mph.
The bus stopped at the Devil’s Postpile and it emptied save two families. We got off the front of the bus and then re-entered at the back. We had seats to ourselves. We kept our packs on, but were able to relax. The families didn’t seem to notice we were there. The two women started chatting. I’ll call them Suzie and Joanna. They looked like a Suzie and Joanna.
“I met a girl the other day who was hiking the whole John Muir Trail from Mexico to Canada!” Suzie said, fluffing her colored hair. “Can you believe it? Hiking! She’d already gone, like, a hundred miles!”
Aidan and I smiled at each other. Certainly she knows the border is more than a hundred miles from here? Clearly confused which trail is which.
“We went on a hike yesterday that said it was an easy two mile hike, but I’ll tell you, that was not easy. It wasn’t even paved, and part of it was uphill. Not easy. I couldn’t believe that sign. But that girl was hiking and she was camping! Can you believe it! Camping!” Suzie was impressed.
“We’re camping too,” Joanna waved her hand in the air, diamonds on almost every finger, bracelets jangling around, “Oh yes, we brought our motor home this year.”
“Oh not us, we wouldn’t do that. We got a condo. I can’t believe the way that some people camp. Like, in tents. And they cook their food in little pots. It’s crazy, and it’s so dangerous! I knew some people who even took their children camping!” Suzie was getting really amped up.
“In tents? With their children? With all the wild animals out there?” Joanna was in shock.
“I know. Can you believe it? Such an irresponsible thing to do! Where are their parenting instincts? I couldn’t imagine being so reckless with my children’s lives. It was unbelievable. Unbelievable.” None of them seemed to notice us. We were fully entertained. We couldn’t stop grinning. I stuffed my fist in my mouth stifle my laugh.
“Isn’t that right honey? Don’t you remember that?” Suzie pushed her manicured finger into her husband’s shoulder. His eyes were glazed over, his mind far away.
“What? I wasn’t listening,” his eyes came back into focus.
This time Aidan had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing.
“Anyway,” Suzie continued, “we’d never do something like that.”
“Well we went on a bike ride that was, like, five miles long last year.” Joanna didn’t want to get shown up by Suzie. She daintily re-positioned a stray hair and patted it back where it belonged. “Part of that was uphill too. We walked that part. But when we got to the top, we turned around and coming down was really fun.”
I nearly choked. I was furiously writing down everything they said. These were gems I didn’t want to forget. They got off the bus without even even noticing the dirty, stinky hikers with giant packs sitting two rows back. So. Awesome.
At Red’s Meadow, we bought some more Advil, anti-itch cream, muscle rub, and two glorious, gigantic beers. We picked up our re-supply bucket and spread out on a picnic table to sort it all out. I didn’t have a wall charger for my electronics. I’d foolishly believed that my solar charger was going to be reliable. Nearby, there were some very hippy-looking people who were chain smoking cigarettes and said they were PCT thru-hikers. They’d been at Red’s Meadow for five days. One girl gave me a charger to use. She said I could keep it. “See? The Trail Provides.”
Trail Magic! The Trail really does provide!
Before we opened the resupply, we decided to eat. We ordered some burgers and sundaes. Super mediocre, but a nice treat nonetheless. The waitress/cashier seemed a shy and reserved creature, but she was clearly fond of hikers and not of tourists of the regular persuasion. A hiker stood in line, ordered food, paid for it, and told her he’d be outside and would come back in a while to get it. No problem – she smiled. Then a regular tourist wearing regular people clothes said she would also like to place an order and go outside. Her request was met with a steely glare. “Can you sit down inside and order?” The customer was literally and physically taken aback, turned around, and left. The waitress looked triumphant and sweetly asked if she could get anything else for us. We loved her.
We opened our resupply package and instantly recoiled. Horrifying. So nasty. In spite of all of our careful research, the cheese had gone bad. It had swelled, rotted, and exploded out of its packaging, oozing rotting cheese oil nastiness over nearly all the food in the resupply. Since the soft cheese had its own wrapping, we hadn’t put it in Ziploc bags. The harder cheese had mold growing against the wax paper we’d wrapped it in. The salami had gone bad at the ends, and my corn tortillas were a mass of fuzzy green. Oh No. Our beautiful food that we’d worked so hard to make perfect. Our food that we needed to survive out there. Oh. No.
We bought more beer to drink while we figured out this new mess.
We peeled the wax paper off the hard cheese and most of the mold came with it. See, not so bad. We took each item away from the pile and smelled it. If it had cheese ooze on it, or reeked, it went in one pile. If it seemed okay, it went in another. I took pile after pile of food into the women’s restroom and put hand soap on the bags, gently washing and rinsing them, hoping there were no holes in the baggies. They still smelled pretty bad, but it was better. Oh no.
We finished our beers, and we laid all the bags of food out to dry in the sun. We retrieved my phone. It was charged up to around 70%. I plugged the solar charger into the wall. Aidan got on my phone and tried to upload the two blogs I’d managed to write from the trail.
WordPress crashed and deleted my blogs.
They were gone.
Forever.
‘Okay, I can take this. More equipment fail. I can handle this. It’s okay.’ I told myself over and over, closing my eyes and regulating my breathing.
“You okay?” Aidan asked, concern etching his face.
“Yeah, yeah. I got this. I’m good.”
I needed to call my parents before we left. I was happy I had reception.
My mom answered the phone, and I turned instantly into a twelve year old. Sobbing, Aidan gathered me into his lap while I talked to my parents. A giant pile of arms and legs. I blubbered about all the things that were going wrong. Electronics, Ranger Danger, Aidan’s pack wasn’t fitting properly, the cheese explosion. I just spilled my guts out. Calling your mother when things are going bad and you’ve been drinking is just a bad idea. Bad.
My mother instantly became the mother of a twelve year old, “Oh honey, do you need us to come and get you guys?”
“No,” I sobbed, “I swear we’re having a really good time. Really. I’m so sorry.”
I could hear my dad in the background, “What? What’s going on? Can we drive to where they’re at? Let’s get in the truck.”
My parents. Always wonderful. Always parents.
“No, no. Really, it’s super fun. The time of our lives. Everything sucks, but it’s really fun. Promise.”
We packed up and left, slogging uphill through the heat of the afternoon, my eyes swollen. The uphill was long and difficult.
I’d always maintained that mowing a lawn and crying at the same was impossible, but apparently drinking and then hiking up a hill with fifty pounds on my back and crying totally is possible. Aidan, quite the sport, comforted me all day. I didn’t even know what I was crying about anymore, but I’d worked myself into a whopper of a headache by the time we chose a camp. Aidan opened the bear cans. The smell of rotting cheese permeated the air. He made some hot chocolate.
Why am I crying all the time? It’s so annoying. I’m not like this in regular life.
To get to our camp, we crossed a creek by balancing our way along a downed tree spread across islands of wildflowers. It was our walkway. We were near a beautiful waterfall.
I looked up at the sky and asked my wonderful husband, “Have you ever laid down in a field of grass and just looked at the sky? Constantly? For days? It sounds interesting.”
“I think I’d get bored after about two hours.”
Yeah. I guess I would too.