Got up early this morning and chatted with my hapless companion Jeff while packing. He is a physics and calculus teacher with a masters in Geology. He seemed an interesting character, but I was pretty sure he isn’t interested in doing my kind of mileage. Besides the bugs were biting and he still hadn’t got out of his tent by 6:30, so that settled it.
I took a quick picture of the mosquito bog next to our camp site. Nasty.
The first couple hours was flat, slightly downhill to 5k. Then it was time to do some climbing which would eventually top out at 7.5k. Ran into this guy in the lowland area. I guess it was a quayle…dunno.
All morning I was running into SOBO’s. They kept gushing about the spectacular views up ahead, but so far it was just trees and mosquitoes. Around 12:30, I could tell something good was coming
Then, there it was.
Gigantic bowls with snow fed streams turning into creeks which turned into rivers. It was just amazing. Honestly there is no point in writing about it, I’ll just lay out the pictures and videos I took.
After all that fun it was getting pretty late. I walked the knife edge along this path
The trail in that picture took a little over an hour to cover, after which I dropped into one of the bowls. Got mobile service for a few minutes and chatted with Alice until it dropped. Also got a load of text messages from Stormtrooper. He thinks he will be at Whites Pass on Friday. Looks like I’ll be seeing him soon.
I found a nice flat sheltered spot at the edge of the tree line. Setup my tent, talked to a few SOBO’s who were passing by, and crashed. What a day.