Civilization, sort of

Day 6

It is pretty much impossible, or at least very heavy and unpleasant, to carry fourteen days of food.  At home, before we took off for this trip, we measured, planned, organized and shopped.  We had piles of freeze dried dinners, granola bars, bags of trail mix, pudding and hot chocolate.  We portioned the food out so that each of us had three meals a day, plus snacks, that added up to about a pound a piece and discovered that two weeks of food was just too much to carry at once.  Plus it didn’t fit in the dumb bear can.  So, using our guidebooks we picked out a spot that would allow us to send ourselves the rest of the food and keep it until we got there.  I had often heard about this place called Vermillion Valley Resort.  Tucked in the back side of the Muir Wilderness, south of Yosemite, this old fishing resort has become a favorite of PCT hikers as well.  They pick you up on this old party boat and ferry you across Edison Lake to the resort where they feed you, put you up for the night and deliver to you your re-supply food.  So we hiked down to where the ferry picks you up, waited on the granite for two hours, and then hopped on the ferry when it came.  These guys have it figured out.  There were at least twenty hungry hikers on the boat and as soon as they really got started across the lake a portly man stood up near the bow and asked “do you want to know what we’ve got for dinner tonight?”  He was the head chef (I think he eats a lot of his own cooking) and he listed off all of the meat-heavy entrees on the night’s menu.  My husband was salivating, along with quite a few others.  Apparently we were not eating our last trail meal tonight. 

We all trudged off the boat and up the long, sandy shore.  Since this has been such a low snow year, that means it’s a low water year too, and the lake was pretty empty. Crusty green remnants of algae clung to the rocks and there were bath tub rings of former lake levels all around the shore line.   The owner said he’d probably even have to take the ferry out in a couple of weeks, and people would just have to walk in- only another five miles.   The resort was quaint, if not a little of a red neck paradise- small, old trailers were tucked in among the trees, a few shingle sided buildings were dotted about too, and the air smelled like camp grounds.  They rounded us all up, introduced Debbie, and gave us our indoctrination:  Each hiker or set of hikers would be given a tab- anything you wanted from the store or restaurant would be added to the tab- honor system style; our first drink, be it a soda or a beer, was free; showers, complete with towel and soap, were six dollars; restaurant opened at four and closed at ten; electricity was by generator and would be turned off at 10:30, (this was to be very important information later); anyone with a resupply box could pick it up in the morning because there were active bears in the area and they didn’t want all that food out in “tent city”; and the ferry left at 9:30 tomorrow morning to take hikers back to the trail. 

After a heavy meal of rib eye steak and bland fettuccini Alfredo, Mark and I set up our tent and I found a nice little spot to do my journaling. Soon I could hear him snoring away, even though the sound of hikers and campers laughing and talking was pretty loud.  Then they turned on the Karaoke machine.  Socially deprived people with a social outlet and lots of beer= VERY loud karaoke.  One girl was actually pretty good- she sang House of the Rising Sun and Debbie told her if she scored a 98 she would buy her a beer.  Not that any of them really needed more beer- I saw twelve packs and six packs coming over that grocery counter in a steady stream all night long- but the challenge had been set.  I crawled in next to Mark for a little while and let my dutiful wife side wage war with my outgoing side.  Despite the noise, I snoozed for a little while, but woke up on a particularly screechy note and couldn’t get back to sleep.  Participating would have been a lot of fun; trying to get to sleep while they were having fun was not. Finally, just as Mark was ready to give up, the generators shut off at 10:30, right in the middle of a rousing “Ruby don’t take your love to town”! Had it not been for the large circle of drunken hikers by the fire pit until two am, we would have slept well.

My first actual resupply (one year we mailed out our food boxes but never hiked to them because of an injury on trail) was much anticipated.  I thought it would be like Christmas.  It was a lot less thrilling.  We spent about an hour unpacking and repacking food.  I was really glad to see trail mix again and there was a new chap stick and a few other nice items (like Mark’s birthday cheesecake mix) but mostly it was a logistical challenge.  We only had a few items left over that didn’t fit, like that last meal that got replaced with a steak dinner, but that was ok, as I got to contribute them to the Hiker Box.  Almost every resupply point, and lots of back country post offices, have a Hiker Box.  When you receive this lovely new food, you don’t want to have to continue to carry your old food around (usually there is one meal you haven’t really been looking forward to anyway- sort of an emergency stand by which has been sitting in your camping box in the garage or someone gave to you as a free sample), and when you pack things in April or May, there’s no guarantee you are still going to want to eat those things in July. So, people toss their cast-off food into the hiker box so that other hikers can vary their diet, make it to the next resupply, or just grab a quick meal.  The good stuff gets grabbed up right away- we once put in a bag of Snicker bars that disappeared in minutes, and there was even a small scuffle over who got to the box first, although hikers are fairly amiable people and it was settled reasonably.  What mostly remains in the boxes are unlabeled zip lock bags of unidentifiable grains, powders (which usually turn out to be mashed potatoes) and corn pasta. Ray Jardine, a hike/author of some notoriety, insisted in his books that corn pasta has the best protein and calorie rating per ounce.  Hikers were heading to health food stores and combing their local supermarket to buy the stuff and packing it into their resupply boxes so that they would gain the nutritional benefit of the preferred pasta over the next few months of their hike only to find that corn pasta doesn’t cook up very well, especially not at high altitude, and it really doesn’t taste so great either.   One hiker complained that he could never find any corn pasta to put in his resupply, but on the trail he hadn’t any trouble finding it at all.  Probably a lot of it is buried across the wilderness from Mexico to Canada as well. 

Fully reloaded (my pack now weighed 26 pounds!!!) we made our way down to the shore, hopped on the ferry and readied ourselves for another day of trail.  Was it tempting to stay another night in the luxury of civilization?  Maybe a little, but after one rousing night of reveling hikers, we didn’t want to chance what a real holiday would look like.  It was Fourth of July, and we were going to celebrate our Freedom!

It was a hot day and we had a 4.2 mile climb up a 2,000 foot ridge.  The trail was exposed to the sun, hot and dusty, but not too rocky.  I had all my heavy clothes in the pack because I did not want them on my body, plus the nine pounds of food and water for the day as we were told water was sparse in this area.  Whoo!  The water we carry in our packs is in those handy hydration systems where you have a water tube clipped to your chest strap and you can just sip at will.  I sip a lot when I am climbing because my mouth gets so dry, and because it gives me a reason to stop a second.  There is a drawback to that of course.  On the other side, going downhill, my 55 year old bladder doesn’t hold up so well, and I could easily be the poster child for the “frequent and sudden urges” commercial.  Today I got sick of the usual protocol of having to find a tree every twenty minutes, where I have to drop my pack, undo my belt…  So I learned to just answer Nature’s call with my pack on.  Then, after another little while, I kicked my underwear off and just hiked in my skirt.  That was a revelation!!  After that I was almost as quick as Mark in watering the trail’s trees. No wonder skirts are becoming such a popular thing to hike in!

We passed a young couple sprawled out under a tree dead asleep, and kept on marching.  Later, as we stopped for a snack break, they caught up to us.  They live in San Diego, pretty near the PCT, and he had given rides to scores of hikers to and from town- forty four of them as I recall.  I asked him if he had drawn little stick figures on the side of his car with a grease pencil- “no” he said, but that was a great idea!  He had taken their pictures though, and gained an interest in hiking the trail.  So he and his wife decided to do the JMT this year.  They had been camped below us in tent city at VVR, and although I didn’t remember them right away, she remembered us.  She thought we were Thru Hikers-that’s a big compliment.  She was the one that sang House of the Rising Sun so passionately the night before, and it was then that I got to name my first hiker.  As I related before, she was pretty happy to have her trail name, and though she had been drawing hearts in the dust with her poles earlier, at that point she started drawing little sun shines instead.  We leap frogged them all the rest of the afternoon- doing creek crossings together (whoever told us this was a dry stretch was either delusional or lying)  and even helped Rising Sun find her way back to the trail at one point where a downed tree blocked the trail completely and you had to walk way around it. 

We are Cowboy camped on the granite out under the stars near Bear Creek.  No fireworks, no Star Spangled Banner, no home-made ice cream or s’mores to celebrate, just a clear, clear blue sky and freedom as far as the eye see.  And lots of mosquitos. So we shrugged down into our bags before the sun even set, put on our head nets,  and turned on the audio book.  I have no idea whatsoever what happened in that chapter.  Woke up in the night to find the bright, bright moon reflecting everywhere off the smooth granite. It was as bright as sunrise but with a cooler glow, and there were long shadows emanating from my water bottle, my pack, the trees, and then myself as I got up to do what one does in nature in the middle of the night.  Of course I snuggled back into my bag softly humming the Moonshadow song, and it was so beautiful and soulful that I lay awake  quite a while trying to settle that feeling into my soul so I wouldn’t lose it on the long walk tomorrow.