Shortest Day Ever — Wonderland Trail Day Six
(Dick’s Creek to Mystic Lake. Per my AllTrails app: Length: 4.51 miles; Elevation gain: 1,988 ft.; Moving Time: 2:26; Total Time: 2:48)
Early Rising Discipline!
The early light hitting my tent did not inspire the urgency of earlier days as this would be – by far – my shortest day of the trip. That was the price of the walk-up itinerary; to accommodate open and closed camps, some days had to be quite a bit longer and other days quite a bit shorter. But while I had no urgency, I also saw no reason to lay-a-bed, especially as I hoped to do ALL my laundry, even my pants, at my next campsite, in Mystic Lake. Knowing I was on my last bit of battery juice, I determined to take all the last pictures I could along the way. For starters, I got one when I bid farewell to my favorite mountain-view toilet!
Once again I was off before seven and immediately the trail presented steeply climbing switchbacks. Needing a little time to get my legs and lungs going, I took it slow and used my counting method of “sixty-and-eight” (walking breaths vs. resting breaths) to keep me disciplined. Eventually I got my motor humming and, though still gasping, I felt all right. When the trail got high enough to follow the river the gradient lessened, and I tromped along alone in the early morning until a movement on a rock pile caught my eye. A community of marmots were running over the rocks with one particular youngster quite close to me. They are engaging little rascals!
Further along these rocks appeared as long falls coming down the mountain and I was glad to be at the bottom, and not trying to navigate a tricky traverse higher up.
Mr. Bear, Where Are You?
Onward on the trail I encountered a large bear turd, not literally steaming, but very fresh.
“Um, Mr. Bear??” I queried, but had no further sign of the defecator. The last bit to the ridge was steep and short and then I started down. Mystic Lake came into view, under overcast skies, but I found that the camp itself was 0.2 miles below it, straight down. Ugh. I continued downward to the camp, arriving to a completely vacant scene. My official hiking day was done, and it was not yet ten a.m.
The Spookiness of an Empty Camp
It was slightly eerie, six individual sites and also a group site, even further down the trail, and not a soul around. The darkening skies added to the spooky atmosphere. I selected Site 4, but when I realized the path to the water went right through that camp, I switched to Site 5, with a private side path to the water. The water site itself was at a small stream where a giant tree had collapsed leaving a root ball hanging over a slightly deeper pool. The weather seemed strange, going from high clouds to sun to low clouds and gradually thickening, but I gathered my clothes for washing and headed back uphill to the lake.
First, I sought out the ranger station on the remote chance I might get a battery charge there. It was locked up tight. In a pique I left a note on their front porch – “Hi” spelled out in their own firewood, taken from the stacked pile. I wondered if it would amuse or annoy them.
At the lake the weather looked a little worse, so I abandoned my main goal of washing my pants lest I not be able to dry them afterwards. They were truly gross with blood from biting flies and mosquitos, mud from slips on the trail, insect cadavers from mosquitos who failed to fly away fast enough, food from this or that meal, and of course a daily dousing of sweat around the waistband that had poured down from my shirt. But hiking in wet pants was too big a risk and it was not looking promising for any sun. So, I waded in and did all the other laundry, and washed my face, but did not fully immerse myself as a chilly wind was picking up. I did find a grassy bank that was pleasant and tried to dry things, sun or no sun.
A Meeting of Friends Back at Camp
Back to the camp I headed for lunch and then to the stream for water where suddenly Gita came up behind me! I thought the three of them were long gone ahead of me, so it was nice to see a familiar face. I girded myself and asked – did they have any battery power they could spare? The answer was “yes!” This was great news as just one more day of power would get me to the next “civilized” roadhead where a plug charge seemed very possible. As we spoke the heavy overcast finally turned to rain and I rushed around to get my drying laundry into my tent.
What is it about laundry and rain that reminds me of butterflies? I have no idea, but I’ve been meaning to mention them. While the flowers are colorful and stationary, the butterflies are equally colorful, but always on the move. This makes them near impossible to “capture” in a photograph. Together, flowers and butterflies, they harmonize between motion and stillness, in a lovely counterpoint.
I also discovered a great thing that writing about butterflies accomplishes: it stops rain. In this way, twenty minutes after starting, just as my tent fly was getting wet under the tree canopy, the rain stopped, and it never resumed.
The Friendship Gets Deeper
After dinner that evening I dropped by Darcy, Polly and Gita’s tent site to thank them again for the phone charge they had provided for me. I ended up staying more than an hour as our conversation ranged widely. I had learned that Gita was an engineer who had left two PhD programs, a person who was deeply knowledgeable about drones and had worked on them professionally, and who currently – for all his claims about the state of capitalism in America – was a personal financial advisor. He and Polly had been together some 15 years since meeting in a CrossFit class (I think). Gita offered to train Polly, and she scored amazingly well in the CrossFit Games, and they had been together ever since. She had been a hazmat inspector in her county but had recently been moved up to Supervisor. It did not sound like she was enjoying the promotion very much. Darcy’s connection to the others was never quite clear. She had been a public-school teacher of 2nd and 3rd graders for a long time, but during the Covid pandemic had moved on to doing technology projects for the school district. We all had a long discussion of the problems with the education system in America concluding, at a simplistic minimum, that we should have smaller class sizes and compensate teachers better. A casual trail friendship had gone deeper.
Yet we were also all aware that a long day lay ahead. So we let it go and I returned to my tent. In minutes I was asleeep.
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