These are links to the photos from the middle part of our Wonderland Trail hike, posted on The Middle Class Forum. Next Sunday I will start with a new trail.
Here are Entry 1, Entry 2, Entry 3 and Entry 4.
I got an early start to Day 6 on the Pacific Crest Trail because, in my mind, I would certainly be reuniting with the rest of my group that day. Being told that three hikers were ahead of me on the road walk towards Belden vindicated my own decision to take the road. With no maps or guidebook I would have been in serious trouble trudging through snow trying in vain to catch up to the others on a remote ridge. Since we were all somewhere along this road I should have had no trouble catching up to a pair of tenderfoots who were on the point of collapse the day before I last saw them.
Now that I was looking for them, the Vibram soles along the road were quite easy to spot, looking quite fresh. At my first break near a residential area I asked a woman if she had seen hikers come through. She had seen four hikers, which was good news because that meant Savitt already had reunited with them. She added that they came through the day before.
The DAY BEFORE?! I, a lean, mean hiking machine, went from being a half-day behind to a whole day behind a group with two tenderfoots?! This was a serious blow to both my ego and to reason. Well, I resolved I would not be carrying both tents again for these guys anytime soon. I also decided it was time to do some serious hoofing.
I put in over thirty miles that day, started hiking at 7:00 a.m. the next morning, and by early afternoon reached our next resupply stop in Belden. I was a little disappointed that me–the lean, mean hiking machine–could not catch up to the group before our resupply point, but very excited about being reunited with them once again. I stopped in at a campground store that was to be our next mail drop and asked the clerks where in the campground I might find four other backpackers like me.
“They were here, but they left about three hours ago,” was the shocking reply. “What the **** was going on,” was my mental note to self. Our support vehicle could not have even reached the campground yet, I was there two days early, why were these guys shooting beyond our resupply point? Some one had some serious ‘splainin’ to do. Those tenderfoots could start carrying MY weight from now on.
I persuaded a pair of campers to adopt me for the night. The next day Sue and the support vehicle arrived and we got our own campground. She had not seen them, which made the situation get curiouser and curiouser. Later that day everyone else in the group arrived at Belden — for the first time. They had remained up on the ridge with Ken in charge of one of our two guidebooks and Savitt had reunited with them through the help of our other guidebook. Of the three sets of tracks that initially led me astray, one belonged to Savitt getting back “on track.”
Oh, yes, I almost forgot, this trail tale is about how I got my trail name. From the series of mishaps we just experienced we decided we needed to get guidebooks for everyone. We also decided we needed to learn each other’s footprints. Savitt was easy, he had large feet. Ken was easy as well, he did not have Vibram soles. The biggest problem was distinguishing between me and Dan, with similar size feet. Dan had a “normal” footprint while I made divots with my toe, due to a somewhat bouncing stride. My trail name became Diggerfoot.
As for that third set of tracks that I followed down to Gold Lake, and the Vibram footprints I followed along the road? That makes for another “Trail Tale.”
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!
On this site I have included photos for the last three days of my family’s hike of the Wonderland Trail. Photos from earlier days of the hike were posted on my other site, The Middle Class Forum. Here are links for days 1-4 on the Wonderland Trail. The remaining days will be posted next week.
Here are Entry 1, Entry 2 and Entry 3.
Day 4 on the Pacific Crest Trail started out bright and refreshing. We were in no hurry to break our camp high above the snow line. Ken, Howie and Dan finally left around 8:30 a.m.; I waited around an hour longer for our tent to dry and for Savitt to catch up from camping with friends the day before. About an hour later I became impatient and left as well.
I was alone without a guidebook or maps, trudging over snow with no visible trail, but I was not worried. The three others ahead of me made obvious tracks in the snow and I knew they likely be the only tracks until I caught up to them soon enough. After an early ascent I hiked for the most part along a ridge until I came upon a surprised. The tracks split up into three different directions. There had been enough time passed and snow melt so I could not tell which sets were coming or going. There was no obvious trail junction, and certainly no sign. In 1977 the Pacific Crest Trail had few markers of any kind anywhere.
I stopped for lunch and did my best Sherlock Holmes imitation of figuring out which tracks were the freshest. With some confidence I followed the tracks to the right. That confidence slowly eroded as I descended steadily. I eventually came to Gold Lake, where I got advice from the caretaker of a campground where to find McCrae Meadows, the group’s destination for the day. I busted my butt back up the ridge until it occurred to me that at this point I had not a clue whether the group would be at McCrae Meadows or not. After all, perhaps Ken finally made an orienteering mistake or something had happened to one of the tenderfoots. Maybe I had been following my group’s tracks after all. Back down to Gold Lake I went.
I talked to a variety of folks at the campground. Two old guys were suspicious that I was scouting their fishing territory. A 5th generation Californian was cordial enough and interesting to listen to. Some teenagers gave me a beer. None of them knew anything about a group of backpackers. I spent the night at the campground and resolved to hike on roads to our next resupply stop in Belden. At least I was able to dry my boots by a campfire.
I started the next day around 9:30 with a structured plan for making miles on the State Highway towards Belden. I would take breaks at 12:30 and 3:30 and finish up at 7:30. At my 3:30 break I asked a woman doing yard work for water. She asked if I was connected to the hikers who had been through that morning. After being told that I noticed the rest of that day that I had been following Vibram sole prints whenever the shoulder of the roads became sandy. Psyched!
I knew the group could not have been too far ahead of me because of the tenderfoots. I went a little extra that day, about 25 miles, which placed me in a neigborhood of houses by the train tracks the State Highway paralleled. I went up to the first person I saw to ask about crashing on a lawn for the night. Unfortunately, the first person I saw was a teenage girl, and an adult male made himself known when a rock whizzed by my head. I thought “Uh-oh, he thinks some vagrant is hitting on his daughter.”
“Get away from my ****ing truck!” he yelled. Um, OK. I went a little farther down the road and found a patch of grass by the train tracks. The next morning I woke up absolutely confident I would catch up to the others that day. Alas, I was due for one more surprise.
On Day 9 we completed the loop by going from Maple Creek Camp to our starting point at Longmire. It was a relaxing finish to a sometimes challenging journey. Serena (my youngest) declared at the end that, while glad she did it, she would not do another. A few months later she asked me when we would do another journey.
Our morning starts out with one last climb.
Mt. Rainier looming large for one last day.
Our last rest stop at Reflection Lakes
Carter Falls
Finished!
Day 2 on the Pacific Crest Trail was uneventful relative to Day 1 and our feeling of “What the Hell are we doing out here?” I’ve backpacked many thousands of miles facing a variety of hardships, but the end of Day 1 was the only time in my life that I wondered if I could finish. The weather started out below freezing for Day 2, the wind blowing and the snow crusty, but there was more descending than ascending this day. By the end of the day we were in the relatively snow free Yuba River canyon. We hiked past the Jackson Meadow Reservoir, which showed the drought effects of a very light snow year, rather than the immediate effects of the Sierra getting half their snowfall in May.
Day 3 started out even better, as we spent the morning hiking down with light packes into our first resupply point at Sierra Buttes. We picked Donner Pass as a starting point precisely because our first few resupply stops would be close together. At Sierra Buttes a good friend of Savitt’s, T. Fred, was waiting. His family was camping nearby and he invited both Savitt and I to spend the night with them eating steaks and sitting by the fire.
Savitt and I had no worries about being able to catch up with the group. Savitt possessed one of the two guidebooks we used. Though we were no match for Ken at finding our way, the trails were easy enough to follow when we were below the snowline. Above the snowline we could follow the tracks of each other, as we were the only people crazy enough to be out in the wilderness at that time of year.
I was all set to join Savitt and T. Fred, salivating for those steaks, when Howie approached me and said he really wanted me to stay with the group. Of course I had to. Though Ken had more experience I was the figurehead leader and, admittedly, the stronger backpacker. It turned out to be a critical decision.
When it comes to wilderness backpacking what goes down must go up. We left Sierra Buttes with six-days of supplies on our back and a 4,000 foot ascent ahead of us. The weather was dicey even as we left Sierra Buttes; by the time we had climbed a thousand feet we were hiking into driving sleet. Dan was having the hardest time, perhaps because he now had to carry the tent that he and Savitt shared. I gave Howie our tent and took Dan’s. That worked for maybe a half mile.
We ascended on a clear path so we did not really need Ken’s guidebook or orienteering skills. That was a good thing for Ken. Wearing sneakers in cold weather was not the best way to stay warm. He compensated by hiking fast and then huddling under some bush eating M&M’s until we caught up. Dan and Howie insisted I hiked in front of them instead of in the rear. They thought that better motivated them to keep going. I hiked as slow as I possibly could for their sake, yet every time I turned around they were fifty yards behind me.
I took the tent back from Howie and carried both two-man tents, but still could not hike slow enough for them to keep up. We became like a slinky: Ken springing ahead, me a little afterwards and the two tenderfoots in the rear. We would meet together by whatever bush Ken was hiding under and repeat our “slinky” procession. The direction we hiked faced us directly into the storm along the exposed side of a ridge. Sleet whipped my face as if by deliberate insult.
It’s an odd thing of human nature that things don’t seem bad if you know someone else is having it so much worse. Between Ken flirting with hypothermia and the two tenderfoots flirting with collapse I was oddly inspired to just plod along, even trying to provide a moment of cheer here and there. Granted, my attempts at cheer might as well have been at a zombie convention, but I did my best.
Of course we ascended above the snowline again, though mercifully enough this was about the time the storm started to abate. We stuck together again with Ken in his customary lead role and me dropping back to the rear. We set up camp a little short of our destination but everyone was in surprisingly good spirits, relieved that we completed perhaps the toughest climb we were ever going to face on our backpacking adventure. When you reduce your expectations to simply surviving the glass becomes half full. In our tent that night Howie said something to me that made my day: “Kirk, I could not have made it without you.”
Day 4 would bring its own unique problems, and this time I would be the one most in trouble.
More photos for Day 8 of the Wonderland Trail can be found on The Middle Class Forum.
Ridge walking south of Indian Bar. Mt. Rainier in the background
A glimpse of the Tatoosh Range south of Mt. Rainier
A spectacular view of Mt. Rainier
Lupine Meadow and Mt. Rainier
The beginnings of the box canyon over the Cowlitz River
Sharing dessert at camp.
How I Got My Trail Name – Entry 1.
We drove out from Connecticut to Donner Pass and a Ford Econoline van that belonged to Dave Hall, the person who came up with the idea to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in the first place. We made the trip in 2 1/2 days with one close call in Nebraska. I was driving at the time and decided, at night, that I would skip Lincoln and refuel somewhere on the other side of the state. For a guy from Connecticut, I can tell you now that Nebraska is a very long state. I finally found a gas station that was opened, 350 miles or so into the state, and rolled in on fumes at about 2:00 a.m. We put 22 gallons into a 20 gallon tank.
Near where the Interstate crosses Donner Pass there is (was?) a turnoff where we pulled over for the night. Ken and I slept on top of the van and ironed out some differences we had during the preparation phase. Ken is the most experienced backpacker in the group but not a natural leader, he gets cranky easily. Before falling asleep we admired the stars above — and the abundance of snow around us. Our last call to weather stations out west at the beginning of May was very promising, the Sierra Nevada had a very light winter for snow. Unfortunately, they got half of their snowfall for the year in May, in between the time of our last check-up and the moment we laid on top of the van contemplating the journey ahead of us.
The next day was spent at Clair Tappan Lodge near where we would begin our thru-hike. Based on the feel of the lodge — wooden beams, fireplace, hot chocolate at hand and all — we could have been getting ready for a cross-country ski trip. Um, except that we did not have skis or snowshoes or, well, any kind of foot gear that one might want for an adventure in snow. In fact, Ken was wearing tennis shoes, since his relative flat arches did not take to boots well. I was just a tad apprehensive that night.
We began our hike the next day, May 24th, 1977, heading north on a jeep road. “Hey!” I’m thinking, “This is not so bad.” We turned off the jeep road onto trail, though by that time we merely turned off a broad swath of snow to a more narrow one. We climb our way up to around 7800 feet, enough altitude to induce headaches. At least I had headaches. Our two tenderfoots who had not thru-hiked before, Howie and Dan, looked too miserable to be thinking about headaches. If each step was getting to be a struggle for me I could only imagine what was going on with them.
We had lunch at a stone shelter. Unlike the AT, where shelters are spaced every 8 miles or so, this shelter would be only one of three along the entire 2600 mile trail. Savitt had a thermometer on his pack that recorded the temperature inside the shelter at 29 degrees Fahrenheit. That was the high point of the day in more ways than one.
We trudged up to 8000 feet to a ridge that afternoon. At least it was supposed to be a ridge, all I saw was a dense fog settled on top of everlasting white. No trail, no footprints, no visibility, but we had Ken Bell. Ken kept leading us in what I would swear at times was the wrong direction, but we somehow came off the ridge where we were supposed to. On the flip side, Ken was getting blitzed, perhaps because he was hiking in tennis shoes. Ken could not focus on anything beyond which direction to go and it was up to us other two “experienced” hikers to keep the two tenderfoots going.
We made camp at dusk, a mile or two short of our intended destination, but we had been post-holing thirteen miles or more through snow for much of the day while adjusting to the altitude. I doubt the tenderfoots or Ken could have gone further even if we were willing to hike into darkness. Savitt and I shared a tent that night. For most of the trip Savitt would be tenting with Dan, and I with Howie, so we could carry the full weight of the tents for the tenderfoots. Yet Savitt and I were best friends. He was, in fact, best man at my wedding. We had to make an exception this one night to tent together and “compare notes.”
We were thinking similar things: “What the HELL are we doing out here?” But you have to understand that, between Savitt and I, that kind of question was just all part of the fun and games. The worst things got, the more Savitt and I tended to joke about them. There would be plenty more fuel for jokes coming up in the near future.
For more photos for this day of my family’s wilderness backpacking journey on the Wonderland Trail, visit The Middle Class Forum.
Heading south from Panhandle Gap with Mt. Adams in the background
Making our way over snowfields
Mt. Rainier Park ranger using flagging for snowfield navigation
The price to pay
Our camp at Indian Bar. "For afterwards a man finds pleasure in his pains." Homer