We woke to thick frost on our sleeping bags. We slept out last night, and the stars were glorious, but the temperature was super cold. That combined with moisture in the air and we are iced in. I had put water in my frying pan to use to cook my breakfast, but it had not just iced over. It was frozen solid- about an inch thick.
Naturally, with a cold morning the first thing you would want is a early sunrise to start warming things up. We are camped in a vast plain-like area, so the sun should reach us much sooner than is we were camped in a steep walled valley, as has been the case on most mornings of this trip. The only thing to the east of us is Mt. Humphrey, a 14,000' peak. But it is just a tall bump on a very distant long eastern skyline. What are the chances that we are camped in the exact position such that the sun has to rise above the very top of Mt. Humphrey before it can hit us? Turns out, very high. In fact, we watched every other part of the basin we are in get direct sunlight as we shivered through cooking breakfast and packing before the sun finally peeked out over the top of that peak and gave us it's warmth. Great positioning.
We headed north toward Puppet Pass, our high point for the day, less than a mile away. We climbed the treeless, rock ridge above Mesa Lake and contoured into the broad pass. Here we stopped to enjoy the view, look across the French Creek valley to Merriam Lake, our next destination, about 5 miles away.
The descent down the north side of the pass is steep and boulder filled. We picked our way down and were soon standing in the meadows at the base. We walked across the broad plain that contains Alsace Lake, Puppet Lake and a few other lakes, stopping to check the fishing (not good), then dropped off the edge of the lake basin and descended to French Creek where we turned left (west) on the Pine Creek trail.
We followed the Pine Creek trail about a mile, looking for the unsigned, and little used Merriam Creek trail. On the map, the trail junction is shown just below the 10,000' contour line and where the creek gets very close to the trail. With iPhones in hand watching the altimeter app showing a slowly decreasing altitude as we walked down the trail and watching the creek approach the trail we spied the faint trail taking off the the right. We stopped at the junction for lunch, spreading some of our wet items from last night's frost out to dry.
The Merriam Lake trail goes straight up the slope, no switchbacks, no apologies. It is steep, but you quickly arrive at the basin that contains the lake. It is still better than a mile through this treed and lush basin up to the lake itself. Once there, we dropped our packs and tried fishing. The fish were small, so we released most we caught. Then we realized we were not going to catch anything big, so we set about catching fish for dinner. By the end of the afternoon we had eight small fish, two fry pans of four fish each.
As we were setting up to fish, a hiker walked up to us and told us how he had been here 15 years ago, but did not remember much about it, except he had some pictures and was trying to match the scenery to his photos. He shared the photos with us and we found he was standing very near to where they had been taken.
We introduced ourselves. his name was Andy, from Pennsylvania. He is a high school physics teacher out for a week long hike. He flies home this Sunday and must be at school on Monday.
Craig and I grabbed our packs, to walk to the other end of the lake to fish and camp as Andy had set his tent up right we had set our packs down. Once at the other end of the lake we found a level place to camp near the inlet. Clouds were forming again this afternoon and the thought of thunderstorms motivated us to put up the tarp. Plus, we hoped the tarp might lessen the frost coating our bags might receive if frost was in the offing.
While Craig fished this end of the lake to complete our set of eight fish, I slept. Then it occurred to me that we could get word to Barb and Sally that we were a day or so behind our planned schedule if we asked Andy to send a text to each of them when he went out on Saturday. I walked back to the other end of the lake while Craig cleaned the eight fish ( did I get the good end of this deal?) and was able to Airdrop the message we wanted sent to Barb and Sally directly to Andy's iPhone. While there Andy asked if we wanted any of his extra food as he was going out on Saturday and would appreciate not having to carry it. I was delighted to take a large bag of peanut M&Ms, a big of hazel nuts and dried cranberries, a goulash dinner, a bag of powdered eggs and some quick energy packs off his back.
Back at camp the fish were cleaned, so we had fish and Andy's goulash for dinner, both delicious.
Dinner done, we called it a night, hoping the tarp would screen out some of the frost. The waterfall above the inlet softly rattled down the rocks as we fell asleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment