~12-13 miles
CW-1 & CW-2
I wake up at 6 when Granite unzips his bag and gathers his
things to exit the tent. I slept pretty well since 9 PM. Nine hours. I guess I
was tired.
I get out of the tent. “You’re up early,” I tell Granite, since
I normally get up first.
“You’re up late,” he replies.
I’m groggy and I have no appetite, but I choke down oatmeal and
a few sips of chai. I’m worried my low energy is because I haven’t been eating
much, and we have a climb today.
I pack quickly and drag my stuff out to the dirt to finish so
Granite can pack the tent. I am still sleepy when our packs are on at 7:45,
and I tell Granite to go ahead. I’ll meet him at the top of the pass.
It’s a 500 foot climb but it feels like so much more. I edge my
way up the trail, pack swaying. At one point, I catch Granite. He says a pika
has come over to chew on his hiking pole. He leaves and I wait, and it returns
to nibble on my hiking pole for a moment. A weird piece of magic. Eventually,
finally, I’m at the top.
Someone has created a strange shape of branches and prayer
flags at the top of Hope Pass. The prayer flags snap in the wind. The view
beyond is all craggy mountains and deep, pine-filled valleys.
Granite is there, and so are two older guys walking the
Collegiate Loop. One is on the phone, so apparently there’s signal on this
pass. I call REI and amazingly, it gets through. The call is spotty and the
woman says she has me on caller ID and that she’ll call back if we’re
disconnected.
“I’m thru hiking in Colorado and I left my underwear in the
last town. Can you send a pair to my next resupply?” I ask.
She says they can and I tell her everything she needs to send it to my next resupply. REI is amazing. They’ll have it there before I arrive Saturday. I guess I don’t have to hike the next two weeks with one pair of
underwear after all.
We're in good spirits headed down Hope Pass, but the descent is steep and technical and slow going. We pass a little cabin halfway down. There are lots of log cabins hidden along the trail, most in poor condition with no roof and only a few feet of standing walls. They’re from back in the prospecting days. But this little cabin is still holding together, with a roof and a metal door made of an old cyanide container. Granite says it was probably an old ski hut.
We descend down into a forest of golden aspen, with a river in
the middle of the valley. Huge mountains box us in on every side and we walk
along the edge of the valley for a few miles.
I’m still slow and groggy so Granite goes ahead and waits for
me every few miles. My appetite is completely shot but I eventually eat a
handful of Fritos, a handful of trail mix, and a small granola bar. Unless I
can eat more, I’ll be looking at an intake of maybe 1600 calories on a day with
a 12 mile hike. I need to do better or I’ll be slow and groggy all day.
We meet another thru hiker who calls himself Huck Finn. He’s got a tiny pack and talks about his failed attempt at the Colorado Trail last year (he got bronchitis on the third day). He speeds off ahead of us.
The path is rolling and after Granite and I split, I walk
slowly for hours. There are swarms of black flies everywhere and they mass
whenever I stop, so I keep moving, even if I’m very slow. I keep thinking I’ll
go beyond the black flies, but they’re with me all day.
I struggle a lot on the inclines, even the slight ones, and I
feel tired. My quads even feel a little sore for a bit, the first muscle
soreness I’ve had on the trail And my belly is still a bit bothered so I keep
loosening my hip strap, though that's problematic because my pants are too
loose and keep sliding down without the hip strap.
I rejoin Granite for the last few miles and he tells me a
story, a fanciful Yosemite search and rescue story. I add a few elements to the plot as
well and the story keeps us busy for a while. We bump into Huck Finn again,
which surprises me because he was moving so fast. He is debating between going
2.5 miles on to camp at Lake Ann or crossing Lake Ann Pass and camping after seven miles.
“I’d feel guilty if I only did 15 miles today,” he says.
“Well, we don’t feel guilty and we’re camping at Lake Ann,” I
tell him.
The last couple miles are slow slow slow. How can this unit of
measure truly be the same as, say, a mile from flat and rolling Section 3? It
takes us an hour to do the last mile, trudging up 1,000 feet and feeling worn
ragged.
But it’s all worth it. Lake Ann Pass is beautiful. The clouds
have been a grey shroud all day and now they’re opening up to reveal perfect blue sky and the sunlight on the mountains brings red, brown, and grey
rock into shining perfection. Lake Ann is small and reflects the green from the
slopes above. The water is surprisingly warm—well, not warm, but not cold.
There’s another couple camped at the lake, and we walk past
them and up a steep slope to a stand of pines. There we find a fire ring, rocky
outcroppings for lounging and cooking, and a small, flat spot for the tent. It’s
pretty rocky, especially for our thin Thermarests.
Granite suggests I go down to the water while he sets up the
tent.
“And you’ll want to go now, so this has time to chill in the lake,” he says, and he pulls out a big bottle of alcoholic root beer from his pack and hands it to me. It must have been from the room in Twin Lakes, because I was too sick to drink anything while we were there.
I’m overjoyed, not just because I like root beer (I love root
beer) but because he hauled this silly, totally unnecessary can all the way up
from Twin Lakes, over Hope Pass and up to this high mountain lake. I don’t
deserve this guy.
I hurry down to the lake and submerge the can, pinning it down
with a few rocks and building a circle of rocks around it. I bathe my arms and
face and neck and legs in the water.
Then I return with 7 liters for cooking and purifying. We make
dinner and then Granite and I climb onto a rock and look down into the valley
and share a perfect root beer. There’s a deer bounding among the boulders, a
few stands of trees, but mostly a great sloping mountain headed down into a
beautiful valley. The sky above is loose, thin clouds shot through with
sunlight and Granite’s arm is warm against me.
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