Day 5 – July 8, 2014
Odometer Reading: 51.46 miles
Miles today: 10.01
Camped: Shadow Creek – elevation 9,065
Today’s Key to Success: Lip Biting
Neither of us slept. Our hips hurt too much, even through the ibuprofen (“Vitamin I”). I dreamed of wide rivers, the other side only accessible over a bridge of railroad tracks. I dreamed of lost wallets and stealing cell phones. I woke up a lot.
Aidan teased me about my exhaustion collapse last night. “You’re like a puppy. Play, play, play, play until you pass out. How are you feeling?” He flashed me that marvelous smile of his. I was just fine, really. I poked through my breakfast, caught myself looking for at least one cat or dog hair. There were none. I missed my fur children.
We found a high alpine lake and took a quick dip. Tiny frogs leaped and swam around us. Aidan the Frog Lover chased them around with his camera while I got some water for laundry time. We placed a trekking pole across a rock and a tree branch away from the lake, hung our bucket of water on it, and put our clothes in with some biodegradable soap. We smashed it all around in there for a while until the water ran black. Repeat. Eventually we were able to rinse them, wring them out, and slap them on some rocks to dry. We glanced overhead. Dark storm clouds were moving in quickly.
Laundry Time
My solar charger was barely working, so I was unable to really do anything with the blog. I managed to create two entries within the last few days, but with no keyboard, it was really time consuming and drained the battery on my phone fairly quickly. The solar charger took my phone from 18% charged to 22% charged, but that’s it. Even after charging all day. Equipment Fail #whatever at this point. I figured if I could at least take pictures, I’d work on the blog later. I’d take good notes.
Most of our laundry dried fairly quickly, but the socks and remaining wet items were strapped to our backpacks and we headed out again. We realized about 1 mile from our laundry spot that we forgot to turn the GPS back on. I added that to the mileage for today.
We were excited to see Thousand Island Lake again. We backpacked in this area a few years ago, and I loved that we had returned. Banner Peak was in the background, busy being all majestic and amazing…
I reached in my third pocket and pulled out my notepad. My pen was gone. My pen was freakin’ gone. All my equipment failures and then my pen disappears? Are you kidding me? Is the universe trying to keep me from writing anything about this experience? I stood there in the fresh air, in the beautiful sunshine, in the perfect conditions, and cried. Aidan hugged me, but I was inconsolable. Tears and dust mixed themselves into mud on my face. I wanted so badly to share this experience with people, and none of my equipment was working. And now my pen was gone. My beautiful basic blue Bic. How could I complete this epic journey with no Bic? I cried and cried.
“Here,” Aidan said, “let’s just take your pack off and sit down for a little bit. It’ll be okay.” He un-clipped my pack’s hip belt. My Bic pen fell out of my shirt onto the ground. “Look! Your pen!” It had apparently slipped from my third pocket and lodged itself near my belly button. I don’t know how I didn’t feel it there. I kept crying. And crying. Aidan kept hugging me. The Great Bic Meltdown wouldn’t release me from its grasp. When my crying finally settled down a bit, Aidan fished an old Ziploc bag from his pack and put my Bic pen and my notebook in there together, folded it up, sealed it, and stuffed it back in my third pocket. “There,” he said, “now it’s safe.”
Down, down, down we went. “How much further until we get to the bottom of this thing?” I asked a hiker coming the other way, as a substitute for ‘hello’. He said it wasn’t much further, and there was camping right at the bottom. Hooray. I was exhausted and didn’t really care what the campsite looked like, I just wanted to set up camp and go to bed as soon as possible. Aidan was right on board with me.
We took our first right at the bottom. A nice trail headed into the woods and toward Shadow Creek. No hesitation, off we went. As we neared the edge of the forest, we startled a coyote. We watched him run by and smiled. The coyote is our totem animal. We figured he must be taking us to a perfect place to camp. Then, indeed, the trail ended at the most incredible campsite in the world. It was nestled at the edge of the tree line, next to a breathtaking meadow, and framed by picturesque mountains. What good fortune! It was evening and no one was camped anywhere nearby. There was a tamped down, flat area barren of vegetation for the tent, large rocks clearly used as a kitchen hundreds of times, and some logs that were cut and arranged around a fire pit as seats.
We did our stretches and checked in with our SPOT Locator. “How nice – that lady over there brought her dog,” Aidan said. She was watching us from across the river. We slapped on some bug spray and set about making camp. The tent was up and the contents of the bear cans spread all over the place when the lady and her dog strolled into our camp.
“Hi, I’m the Ranger here,” the lady said. I looked her over. She brandished no visible signs that what she said was true. Undercover Ranger Danger. “You know you can’t camp here, right?” We shook our heads no and asked why. “Because this area is a restoration area.”
“Oh is it? We didn’t see any signs, and this looked like a well-established camp. The trail isn’t even blocked off. That’s fine, we’ll pack up and move.”
“Have you ever been camping before?”
I looked at all of our backpacking gear, clearly expensive, clearly well-thought-out. I looked at the bear cans and the tent and the fact that we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere. “Yes, we’ve been camping and backpacking. Not in this valley, though.”
“Then you know you shouldn’t be here. The rules are the same everywhere.”
Aidan and I looked at each other, confused.
“This is not only a restoration area, but this is a meadow. You should know you can’t camp in a meadow. Let me see your permit.” She shook her head and frowned. We were naughty little school children.
Aidan dug out the permit and handed it over. “We’re happy to move but with the fire pit and the cut logs, and this cleared out area for the tent, there weren’t any obvious signs that we weren’t supposed to be here…”
She looked at the permit. “You’re doing the JMT?” She scoffed. “Come oooon, guys. You just thought you could get away with it. Don’t even try to tell me that you thought this was okay. I know the Ranger went over all of this with you when you got this permit. They probably even read it out loud to you. Look, it says right here you have to be 100 feet from water. 100 feet. See it says that on this other page too. It’s even circled.” She pounded the paper with her finger for emphasis.
Well, she had us there. It sure did say 100 feet from water. We were probably more like 50 feet from water. “Don’t you know what 100 feet looks like? You’re like ten feet away,” she said. Clearly she didn’t know what 100 feet looked like either.
“Okay, no problem. We’ll pack up and move.” We moved toward our tiny expensive items.
“You should always pace off your campsite from water. Try to remember that 45 paces will put you around 100 feet away. 45 paces is safe.”
“Okay, no problem. We’re leaving.” I bent over to pull up the tent stakes from the ground. How many times did we need to say we were leaving?
“When people like you camp in places like this, it really takes the land a long time to recover.” Okay, now she was pissing me off. We try really hard to be stewards of the environment. We do our best to make as little impact as possible. We practice the philosophies of Leave No Trace. I was packing out my toothbrush sheddings, for crying out loud. People generally don’t get to speak to me with a tone like hers back in our regular lives. She was treading on thin ice. My blood was beginning to boil. I felt my face flush. I kept my back to her and bit my lip to keep from talking.
Aidan looked at me, knowing I was struggling to stay polite. “Where would you recommend we go?” My husband is a nicer person than I am.
She suggested a place back across the trail. We kept packing up. She kept standing there. I kept biting my lip. She finally turned and walked back across the river. She and her dog watched us from there, making sure we really left. I saw a piece of trash in the campsite that wasn’t ours. I picked it up and put it in our trash bag. “Take that,” I thought, “See? We’re good people.”
We went back to the trail. There were two campsites next to one another on the other side of the trail. A couple was setting up their tent in one of them. Aidan rightly pointed out that if she wanted to be a stickler about the 100 feet away rule, she should also note that the next sentence down on the permit also stated that campsites needed to be in established areas 100 feet away from the trail also. The site where she wanted us to stay really was about 15 feet off the trail.
We hiked about another 1/2 mile and climbed up a bluff. We were then most definitely in a proper camping area. I swore I could feel her still watching us. I bet she followed us from a distance. “Tourists”, right?
What a rough day. We set up our camp for the second time, and decided that we’d brought the Undercover Ranger Danger Karma upon ourselves since we really had camped several places where we shouldn’t have camped. Maybe the Ranger encounter wasn’t so bad after all. Now our Karma was balanced again.
Besides, the view from our new spot was great.