I'll try to make this brief and entertaining. I'm not the best action writer but I hope to share a little bit of the fun that Dan, Jason and I had walking the Wonderland Trail.
Day 0
Sunday, August 16
Dan and Jason roll up to my house about 6:30 in the morning. We load up my stuff and goof off for a little bit before we hit the road. I kiss Dev goodbye, pat the dogs one last time and then we roll out of town in Dan's car. The drive is uneventful. We're all relaxed since we don't start hiking until tomorrow (Monday). We chat about our gear and set up. We speculate on the hardest day. I bet that Day 1 is going to be the worst. Dan and Jason both vote for Day 3. We keep running over the gear list and itinerary as we roll up I-5 and near our turn off.
Finally we get to the park. No fee. It's the last no fee day for the fee free weekend on National Parks. Excellent. We drive up to Longmire Wilderness Information Center. The patient ranger helps us sort through our paperwork. Jason doesn't have his paperwork. No permit. We're sweating it. The ranger and Jason keep going through the book looking for his permit. And they don't find it. So they check the computer (which had been down to this point) and don't find him there either. They had rejected his permit application so he wasn't on file. The ranger added him to Dan and my permit since each camp would easily fit all three of us. So we logged in our cache and left three and a half days worth of food at the ranger station.
We started the long drive to Sunrise for our first camp. Generally this takes about two hours. We didn't feel rushed and kind of moseyed along. We wanted to stop at Paradise but there was no parking and the crowds were crazy. Instead of waiting for the shuttle we just kept driving. We stopped for a couple of view on the way to Sunrise. There was no parking at Sunrise either. So once again we got back into the car and drove. This time we went to White River Campground and established our last civilized night for five days.
We drink a couple of beers. We cook up some spaghetti and beef and sauce. We gorge ourselves. We sleep. in a big tent on air mattresses.
Day 1
Monday, August 17
Projected mileage: 24.8 miles
Elevation gain/loss: 4400 feet gain/7830 feet loss
Morning rolls around too soon. The sun's not up yet but the alarm rings us out of our slumber. We pack up camp by the light of headlamps and drive back to Sunrise at 6400 feet on the northeast side of Mount Rainier. It's not crowded this morning. We can find parking. We sort our gear again. Jason brews up a tub of coffee in his Jetboil. We look at each other and the mountain and our coffee. We swallow the last but of caffeinated goodness, rinse our cups and strap in.
6:45 am and we are finally doing this. Months of anticipation building to this moment. Planning, obsessing even, for this trek. And it starts with a step. One step. Anticlimactic and momentous. We decide that the motto for this trip is "One step at a time." Trying to wrap or heads around 93 miles of walking is just too hard. One step at a time. We'll get there bit by bit. One step at a time.
So every trip has at least one piece of gear break or malfunction. It's sort of a law of outdoor adventure. And it keeps things interesting. Not even one hour into our trip, we pull up to the junction that puts us on the Wonderland Trail for real. It's 7:22 am. I pull the camera out of my waist pack and fumble it while trying to turn it on. And I drop it.
I drop it onto the extended lens.
The camera's out of commission. "Dev always hated this camera anyway," I say to myself after I finish cussing a blue streak. At least we have Jason's camera still. So we can keep taking pictures. And the added bonus is that we got the major gear failure out of the way very early in the trip.
We make pretty good time after the breaking of the camera. We stride right along and through Sunrise Camp around 7:45 am. We circle back down the White River Campground about 8:55 am and took a break.
Side note: We didn't just start at White River for the loop because there was no long term car parking like there is at Sunrise.
Then we really got into our stride. We crossed the White River over a couple of log bridges and then made a long traverse around Goat Island Mountain. After the traverse we made it into the drainage for Fryingpan creek and started climbing up and up. We passed through Summerland Camp and hit Fryingpan Creek at 12:30 p.m.. We sat in the sun soaking our feet in the frigid glacial melt. I can only keep my feet in for 30 seconds or so at a stretch and then I have to pull them out of the water. After they warm up, then they go back into the water for another dousing. I did this cycle for about 20 minutes. It felt so good. And during this process, I reach into my pack and pull out a 9 ounce summer sausage to share with Dan and Jason. Dan looks ecstatic as he eats his portion. Jason counters my luxury with some mini cheese wheels. Yum!
We suit up about 1:05 p.m. and start the march to our high point for the day: Panhandle Gap at 6445 feet above sea level. And we get there only 30 minutes after lunch. We're marching through bare rock swept clean by wind and snow. Beautiful and barren. Stunning landscapes and awesome views roll out from under our feet on the ridge. We ride the ribbon of trail up and down through several dished basins. We come out of the last depression onto a ridge where we can see the five huge waterfalls that start the Ohanapecosh River by dropping thousands of feet down sheer cliffs from the Ohanapecosh Glacier.
The Wonderland Trail winds down the ridge to Indian Bar Camp, dropping elevation quickly and without much shade. The sunny 1600 foot descent drains all three of us. We hit the camp and drop our packs and find some shade. As Dan wanders off to find the camp toilet, Jason pulls out his Jetboil stove and brews up a triple serving of coffee (he brought a full half pound of fresh ground coffee in his pack!). We sit on the wood bridge overlooking the hydraulics of Waulaukaupauken Falls and drink our coffee and chat with another Wonderland hiker for most of an hour.
The other hiker has been on the trails for 10 days and expects he'll finish in two more. He's on a three month leave of absence from some cubicle farm in Riverside, California. He won't be more specific about his job so I can only assume he doesn't particularly care for his current career all that much. He does tell us that he endured an epic 5 day rain storm the previous week on the trail. He described a heavy, cold and soaking rain that lasted all day and stopped him from most of the side trips. He's happy for the hot and sunny weather we now enjoy on the trail.
Invigorated by almost an hour of rest and a cup of coffee, we jump back on the trail about 4 p.m. and leave Indian Bar behind. We still have a long way to go to make Maple Creek before sun down. We finally reach Nickel Creek camp at 7, and then Box Canyon shortly after that. We've dropped another 2500 feet since INdian Bar. Deep in the Canyon and in the trees, we start to lose our light. Maple Creek sits about two and a half miles away. Dan's starting to slow a little from the long day. So we come up with a stupid plan. Dan has his GPS and will roll into camp at his pace after he rests some more at Box Canyon. Jason and I will hot foot our way down the trail to hit camp, grab a spot, filter some water and get dinner ready for when Dan shows up.
I don't recommend this plan ever. In my D&D days, this was called "splitting the party" and was a big no-no. Turns out, it feels even worse in the real world. Especially when that real world is dusk in the woods in bear country.
Jason and I hit camp after the longest mile and a half I've ever experienced (up to that point). I was cursing under my breath trying top set my tarp up. Once I had that done I was going to take a liter of water and a headlamp and head back down the trail for Dan. Jason had pumped some water and started dinner. I only had the tarp halfway up when we heard a creak-clank noise. A noise like Dan's coffee mug on the outside of his pack. I see a headlamp coming. It's Dan! He flew down the trail and got to camp about 10 minutes after we got there.
So here comes the big confession. When we started out from Sunrise that morning, we headed west out to the Frozen Lake intersection. When we hit the Wonderland Trail and headed south we soon hit another trail junction with a sign pointed to Sunrise... 0.5 miles away. ARRRRGH! We added three miles and an hour of hiking to our day because a stupid navigational error on my part. We really could have used that extra hour of daylight at the end of the day!
No comments:
Post a Comment