Day three- Red's Meadow

With our first big pass officially behind us, and having slept at least nine hours last night, we were on the trail with the sun this morning, completing our first ten miles before noon.  Mark wanted to get in to Red’s Meadow in the Mammoth Resort area because they have a little store and café.  I am pretty happy with trail food, but Mark needs more calories.   People often ask us what we eat and how we cook out here- not the people who are out here, unless we are comparing gear, which is something hikers like to do, the way people in town check out each other’s cars- but those who haven’t done much or any backpacking are always curious about what we eat.  For breakfast I always have a protein shake.  I prefer Rob Rey’s Whey Protein because it’s all packaged up, tastes pretty good and mixes really well.  I also use other brands and have even made my own with some hemp protein powder, powdered milk and vanilla flavoring.  Not too bad.  This provides me with some initial calories that I can just drink as I go which is important because my husband does not take time for breakfast.  I also carry a granola bar in my pocket for munching on with my shake.  He just eats the granola bar.  He used to always carry a Snicker bar in his pocket, but he rarely does anymore.  I think he got sick of them. Lunch has been the most challenging meal.  We often carry bagels and spread them with cream cheese or peanut butter. I have to have jelly, too, so I always help myself to the little plastic jelly packets at restaurants and squirrel them away for later.  Sometimes its crackers and cheese- we carry WASA because Mark is Swedish, and also because it travels in tact- most crackers break.  I add in dried fruit or fruit leather, and, when available, we add wild greens.  Our recent favorite is pudding.  We buy the instant pudding mixes, pour them into baggies, add milk powder and label well with a sharpie (this is an important step as we end up with a fair amount of powders in baggies- hot chocolate mix, powdered milk, drink mix…).  There’s always plenty of water about, so we just add the water, shake the container and put it in a stream to cool. It’s so nice to have a cool, creamy pudding when you are out on a hot trail.   Yummy!  Dinners we take time for.  After we’ve found a nice place to camp, Mark picks out a good flat rock and sets up the “kitchen.”  After doing a lot of research and test runs, he decided on using dry fuel tablets to cook with.  They are greasy, smelly and generally yucky (anything that causes you to choke if you get a strong whiff of it should probably not be used to cook your food) but they are easy to carry, can be shipped in our resupply boxes, light quickly and burn well in even in wet weather.  His stove is an old bean can cut to size with appropriate air holes and all.  We have two pots. One is his fancy titanium (very light and strong) two cup pot, which we mostly use for boiling water, and the other is a one quart pot which we use for most of the food.  Our meals are well planned out at home, in fact I made big batches of shepherd’s pie, tamale pie and some other casserole type dishes a few years ago, cutting the ingredients nice and small, simmered them until they were good and thick, placed them in the dehydrator, packaged them with my seal a meal and labeled them with a sharpie.  These taste great and I know what is in them, but they do take a little longer to cook than the back packing meals you can buy at the store.  Those are pretty convenient though, you just pour the boiling water into the bag, smunch it up a bit and wait ten or fifteen minutes.  While we are waiting on dinner, we often enjoy a quick soup or hot chocolate or spiced cider or something- anything to get those calories in. 

But back to the calorie thing, as you can see there is not a lot of food each day, though in addition to the three meals we also have snacks (bars, trail mix, dried fruit) to fill in the holes on those long miles.  It seems we are very often hungry.  So when there is an opportunity to get to a store, which is pretty rare out here, Mark makes a bee line.  We hopped a Mammoth bus from Agnew Meadow, which was actually a meadow with green grass and wild flowers and tall trees along the perimeter, to Red’s Meadow, which was not really a meadow, but a pack station, camp ground and store with lots of little meandering trails running throughout.  Even after just two days on the trail it is a little overwhelming to be around so many people and noises and business, but we washed up as best we could in the faucet outside and headed in to the café for lunch.  There was a whole congregation of hikers eating, talking, telling stories and laughing a lot.  There were also vacationing families enjoying a meal together.  We were somewhere in the middle, but had a big burger kind of lunch with a chocolate shake, paid the bill and headed back outside.  It was actually pretty nice at Red’s Meadow.  Cute little cabins lined the central area, the store was well stocked, the people were friendly.  The air smelled of campfire and sunshine and horses.  The warm sun on the picnic tables was too much to resist, and we stretched out to get a few winks.  Mark was snoring away in no time, but I was busy batting at flies and mosquitoes and catching up on my journal. It was so peaceful.  I started to wonder how much they charge for cabins.  This was so pleasant- no walking, no sweating, no sleeping on the ground…  I was seriously in danger of getting caught in this trap.  How do you find the motivation to move on and keep working so hard when this is almost as nice as the wilderness and so relaxing? I decided I would send some post cards, and wandered over to the store and struck up a conversation with a lady Through Hiker (those travelling the PCT from Mexico to Canada in one hike) and asked her how she keeps motivated to move on.  We had a great talk- honest and inspiring- the kind I never really feel I get in the “real world” – and she really encouraged me to keep at it.  She said the piece of trail I would be on next was amazingly beautiful and I shouldn’t miss it. Mark woke up and came over too, and we all talked and traded trail stories for a little while.  Feeling bolstered by the nap, the calories, the good conversation and the hope of a nice trail ahead, we picked up our bags, hats,  poles and bearings and moved on down the trail. 

               A few years ago there was a big forest fire near Red’s Meadow.  As we approached the perimeter we were amazed to see how close the fire had come.  They used the corral road as a fire break, and as you left the trail from Red’s Meadow and crossed over to the PCT, the difference was breathtaking.  On the Red’s Meadow side were pines and cedars, green and tall with branches swaying in the wind.  On the other side were towering trunks, scorched and broken off, with some small brush and ground cover growing back in.  This past year they had some major wind storms through that area, and a lot of the dead trees had been toppled- so many that in places you couldn’t find the smaller trails.  We walked quietly through this Valley of the Shadow of Death and were glad to get out on the other side, even if the trail was in full sun and a climb over a small pass. 

               Trail crew had been out on the trail that day, doing some tread work and cleaning up the downed trees.  They came straggling home carrying their tools of the trade and wearing their classic yellow hard hats.  I much appreciate these people who give of their time to keep our trails easy to travel.  We always stop and say hello and thank you and sometimes visit a bit about the work they have been doing.  They are usually very friendly, even though they have got to be tired and hot.

So:

               Here’s to the Stalwart Trail Crew

               The ones who have forged on before

               They’ve blasted out ledges and hedged granite edges in stone

               To make the way sure.

               Three Cheers for the harrowing Trail Crew

               Undaunted by heat, bugs or snakes

               They cut steps in stone and when the path’s overgrown

               They’ll clear it, whatever it takes

               The Trail Crew’s work is enduring

               Their legacy left on the land

               Should you find yourself willing, to do hard work, that’s thrilling

               Just sign up to lend them a hand.

The three miles to camp went very quickly after all the days previous commotion, and when we arrived at the creek where we had planned to camp, just past some very red cinder cones, we found two hikers already there.  But they were welcoming and there was plenty of room, so we pitched our tent, prepared our meal, and spent the rest of the evening swapping stories and gear advice with Dave and Bill while we watched the sun set on the mountain spires across the valley.