19.8 miles - Total to date - 530.6 miles
Up at 5:00 am. Packed and out of camp at 5:30 am. First order of business, reacquire the cell signal I had last night and make sure my SIMM transplant is working.
I returned to the location where I had been talking with the Caldwells and took the phone off airplane mode. “no SIMM card installed”. What? I had put my ATT card in this phone last night. I restarted the phone. This time I got “no signal”. I moved to a new location. “no SIMM card installed” What? I sat in the trail in the dim first light of day, carefully removed my paper clip from my electronics bag and ejected the SIMM card, made sure it was seated on the carriage correctly and reinserted it. “no SIMM card installed”. Damn! I decided to hike on. I had navigation, just no communication.
When I stood up to start hiking I noticed that my umbrella was not on my pack. What?!? Did I leave it at my camp spot? I always do a triple check to make sure I didn't leave anything, so it couldn't be there. hmmm . . . Ah ha! My fall last night. The iPhone shattering, face planting fall. It was violent enough to eject it from my pack. Now, exactly where did I leave the trail to go to the lake? I groped around in the sparse vegetation for five minutes trying to recognize where I had been. Finally, I recognized the entangling branch and there was my umbrella, lying in the duff and rocks. I put it in my pack. Between the SIMM card and umbrella I had lost 45 minutes of hiking time. I decided to get out on the trail. I stopped at the lake outlet and filtered a liter of water. Finally, on the trail. As I hiked in the quiet, smoky morning light I contemplated the SIMM card conundrum. It occurred to me that maybe the contacts on the SIMM card were dirty. Those are cleaned with an eraser. I have an eraser on the pencil I brought for writing notes. I let the idea settle for a quarter mile as I walked, then sat down in the middle of the trail, extracted my paper clip from my pack and ejected the errant SIMM card. With my pencil eraser I cleaned the gold contacts until they shined, reinserted the card and crossed my fingers. “No Service”. Yeah! Sort of. At least it recognized the SIMM card. In a mile, I reached the top of a ridge. Service!! Three bars!! I had navigation and communication. Even though it was early Monday morning (8:00 am) I sent out a text or two. Then I downloaded the Overdrive app so I could download the Dan Brown book I had been listening to. It may not have been very good, but he left me hanging when I crunched my phone. I had to know what happened to Robert Langdon! And, I had started listening to “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed but only part one of thirteen had properly downloaded so it was on my wish list to download. I had met Huck Finn and Dimps a few minutes earlier and they were doing the same thing I was, downloading books while wandering aimlessly looking for the strongest signal.
Halfway through my downloads I got a text from ATT telling me I had used up all my high speed data. Really? That means I would have to stand around for hours to download my books. But, one piece of good luck occurred. The Dan Brown download was small because I only needed the last part of the book and it made it on before the data ran out. At least I could find out what happened to Robert. Cheryl would have to wait until tomorrow, the 14th, when my high speed data returned.
About six miles up the trail we crossed the road at Etna Summit. This is the road that accesses the town of Etna. Everyone on the trail was making a trip to Etna to resupply . . . except for me. In reading the literature before I came I found descriptions of long waits for hitched rides to Etna across this little used road. They described waits of two or three hours to get to town. I decided to go the entire 150 miles from Castella to Seiad Valley without a resupply, meaning I was carrying 8 days of food, or better than 17 pounds when I left Dunsmuir. Road Runner, an Australian girl of 23 I had met was the only one attempting the same thing, but she had run out of food even before the Etna Summit road and had taken another road, highway 93, to Etna to resupply.
I dropped into the Etna Summit road and found Road Runner brewing her 10:00 o’clock tea in the parking area at the trail head. Dimps and Huck had already arrived and had gotten a ride to town. That was quick! I stopped for a quick bite and chat with Road Runner, then continued on. 40 minutes later Dimps, Huck and Road Runner passed me. I had expected Road Runner to do so, especially with a name like that. I was in the woods, “Dropping the kids off at the sandbox” as Derek would say, when they passed. I caught them a few minutes later at the trail register book checking the names of those they knew ahead of them. I joined them and did the same. Here I found out Dimps had hitched to town, bought groceries for his resupply and hitched back in one hour! So much for the long waits for a ride.
Today, the trail seemed to make endless traverses along the sides of the ridges, occasionally slipping through a pass. At least 15 of the 19.8 miles today were through burned forests. And although it was smoky, through the haze I could look far into the valleys below and see the devastation. This much burned area makes it hard to stop and sit down, for the ground is blackened and gets everything filthy black.
On the map I saw a pass was coming up and thought I would stop on the level ground to eat lunch. When I got there it too was burned. I searched for a spot to eat and noticed a stump that had been cut after the fire and its horizontal surface was bare of burned wood. I plopped my pack and body onto it and enjoyed crackers, cheese, gorp and fruit snacks. As I ate, a familiar face walked up. I had met her way back near Donner Pass. We recognized each other but couldn't remember names. I told her I remembered her name was given because she liked to sing on the trail. It was a bird name, but I couldn't place it. She reminded me it was Sparrow. She remembered 1st Class, but couldn't remember Coach. It was great to see her. She has very kind eyes and is a soft soul. We chatted for 10 minutes, then she moved on. She had been in Etna overnight. To this point in the trip I assumed she was behind me, but she must have caught up and passed while I zeroed in Dunsmuir.
I was tired from my 28 mile day yesterday and was not interested in pushing too hard. When I noticed Fischer Lake at 19.8 miles I knew that was my destination. Everyone else was interested in getting closer to 25 miles in, plus most had started at Etna Summit rather than 6 miles back like me so they would be 10 miles ahead by nightfall. I arrived at Fischer Lake about 4:00 pm, a decadent time to stop by PCT standards. I was ready to swim and wash the trail dirt off.
The lake was a murky brown with many dead trees below the water and dozens of salamanders floating In the lake like trout. Not inviting. But, in I went anyhow. The dirt was scrubbed off, but the lake slime stayed on when I got out and had to be toweled off.
Using my pack for a backrest, I sat facing the sun in the grassy meadow and typed on my blog, trying to get caught up yet again. The couple camped through the trees next to me came over to say hi. They were very pleasant (Jesse and Dave) and we had a nice chat. When I tired of swatting at the hornets, I moved inside my tent and cooked dinner. I had pitched my tent close to the bushes and away from the lake shore, but while cooking I found the ground so hummocky that sleeping would be impossible. After dinner I drug the tent onto flatter ground to sleep on.
For some reason the hiking seemed tough today. I had a sharp pain in my back, just under my right scapula. I didn't understand the cause, thinking I had packed the fuel canister or pot in such a way that they pushed on my back in that location. Also, my right foot had been painful on the outside of my heel. In the tent close inspection was not needed to see a huge blister formed there. It looked ready to burst. I sterilized my sewing needle from my sewing kit and my foot in that area with my hand sanitizer and poked through the living tissue adjacent to the blister and drained all the fluid out into toilet paper. I sterilized the area again with hand sanitizer. When I woke in the morning the blister was full again and I drained it before hiking. As it turned out I did this twice a day for the next three days until it finally quit filling up on the final day of my trip coming into Ashland.
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