Day 7 – July 10, 2014
Odometer Reading: 73.2 miles
Miles today: 13.00
Camped: Northwest side of Virginia Lake – elevation 10,381
Today’s Key to Success: Hot Chocolate
*splat*. A drop of rain on the tent. Then a few more in quick succession. Aidan and I woke up and simultaneously leaped out of the tent. We grabbed any gear that was left out, stuffed it in our backpacks, wrapped the backpacks in their water proof pack covers, shoved them under the rain fly, waterproof-side-down, leaped back into the tent, and slid into the sleeping bag at the same time. It took us eleven seconds, flat. We were the 2am pit crew of the backpacking world.
When morning got around to showing up, I felt much better. I was no longer questioning myself. I knew I had what it takes to be a long-distance hiker. It just takes a while to settle in to these sorts of adventures. Longer than I expected for this particular one. It was the same concept as long-distance biking, but this seemed so much harder. Mentally hard, I guess. I mean, sure, it was physically hard. We expected that. But this was a different sort of mental game than biking. Easy to get stuck in your own head out in the wilderness, and hard to crawl out of it.
For breakfast we ate whatever was the heaviest food in Aidan’s pack. I had labeled all our food items, and we had portion sizes written on them. The cookies read: “2 lunches a piece”, and the Frito’s read: “This is for 6 lunches. I mean it.” but all of that kind of lost its importance. During the planning stages of this trip, the labeling was helpful when figuring out about how much food we needed to bring, but adhering to a food schedule no longer made sense. Our bodies made clear what kind of food they needed, so that’s what we ate. If we craved salt, that clearly meant we were losing a lot of salt during the day and needed to replenish our body’s supply. We just kind of started eating whatever we craved.
I looked at the landscape as we hiked by. Somehow it was strange to think that though we were seeing all of this for the first time, this area hasn’t changed in a bazillion years. When I was born, it looked like this. When I was 22 it looked like this, and now it still looked like this. It was only new to us. Like when you meet someone very different from you, you have to remember that they’ve probably been that way forever, and gauge your reaction accordingly. The information is only new to you.
Huge trees everywhere had blown down and fell every which direction. They clearly blew down while they were still alive, and recently. Needles browned by death and the sun still clung to every branch. We wondered aloud what may have happened. Beetle infestation followed by a terrible wind? An angry giant? The Sierras don’t get tornadoes, do they?
So many downed trees.
We walked through forests with gentle climbs, fields of wildflowers and meadows with little gurgling streams sliding gently downhill. The streams really did speak to us. They mimicked people in the woods. They told the stories collected from thousands of years, and they recanted the stories in English. We looked behind us again and again, thinking hikers were coming. There was no one there.
We’d packed the tent wet from the rain, so at first break, we lay the rain fly out to dry in the sun while we filled up our water. I spilled the rocks from my shoes. The next section was six miles of hot, dry, dusty path. We gathered three liters of water each. We’d been going through a lot of water lately, but we clearly needed it. We started the section at 10am. Mile after mile of uphill and heat spit us out at an incredible vista point overlooking the John Muir Wilderness and the Cascade Valley.
Lunch time.
I opened my bear canister to gather some lunch items, and the smell of rotting cheese hit me in the face. Smelled like vomit. I recoiled, but dove in for some food anyway. Some other hikers showed up, so I quickly screwed the bear canister lid back on. I was embarrassed.
We continued on through a Lodgepole Pine Forest. The trees were bleeding, sap dripping down their bodies. They looked sad. Wounded. I felt sad for them.
I looked at my salami. I’d cut the bad ends off of it, but it still looked questionable. I ate it anyway along with some Joe-Joe’s cookies. It was kind of awful. Aidan took his shoes off. “Are your toenails turning purple?” We inspected his big toe and his third toe. They looked a little purple to me. He wasn’t so sure. He said he never felt it happen. But that’s how you lose toenails – you never really feel it happen.
The trail climbed down another cliff side. It felt precarious. It was beautiful.
We had our pack covers on. It never rained, but it sure threatened to…
At Purple Lake, a sign read: “A rock makes a great alternative to toilet paper.” We laughed. What do we do with the rock afterward? Are we required to pack it out? Rinse it off in the lake? Bury it?
Jokes ensued for hours.
A PCT hiker passed us headed northbound. We knew he was a PCT hiker because he was lean and tan, a mop of curls all over his head, looking very business-like, and hiking about 25 miles per hour with a teeny tiny little pack. He was there and then he was gone, like it never happened. We’ll be there someday, looking like him. I was jealous.
We stopped on a cliff overlooking a high crystalline lake. I thought of my friend Krystalyn and wished she could see this spot. It was just like her, deep and clear, artistic and beautiful.
Directly after that zen place, the trail turned into rocks the size of my fist. All uneven and sharp and difficult to walk on. I had no rock guard in my shoes, so it didn’t take long for my feet to start hurting. I slowly and painfully worked my way up the trail, past an ancient glacier covered in rock, over our final pass for the day.
We walked around the Northwest side of Virginia Lake and found an old horse camp. I love the horse camps. My favorite. It had a cooking rock for the kitchen, and a perfect, sheltered flat spot for the tent. It was cold. I donned all my feathery gear and hobbled down to the lake with Aidan to enjoy the sunset and get some water in the bucket to make dinner.
Each night, Aidan reads aloud from his Kindle about the next day’s journey while we drink a hot drink. That night was hot chocolate. The full sugar kind, stuffed with calories and deliciousness.
