June 26, 2016 Mile 766-770.3 (plus 16.8 round trip to Whitney Summit) When the alarm goes off at 2am, I feel like I haven’t slept at all. Other hikers were up talking fairly late, and even after that I just didn’t sleep well. I have to fight myself a bit to keep from just turning off the alarm and rolling over. I trick myself into a little bit of wakefulness by imagining the sunrise from Whitney and mustering some excitement about the hike. This will be my second ascent to the peak; the first was eight years ago, so I am honestly excited to revisit some memories. I shake off my sleepiness and sit up in my bag. When I quietly whisper-call to Breanna “Hey, Sprinkler, you awake?” she gives a groaning “yeah…” and rustles a bit. I chuckle to myself at her reticence, because I feel it too; aren’t we supposed to be on vacation? A few minutes later, we’re both out of our tents, our headlamps emitting a faint glow. We’ll leave everything behind except for some snacks and water, so our backpacks are wrinkled and deflated like old balloons. A few other headlamps pierce the darkness of the campground as we set out. The hike starts with a balancing act: we negotiate several small, buoyant, and somewhat loose logs that have been placed across the creek. For the next hour or so, we listen to the creek as it moves farther and closer to the trail. The tunnel-blindness of our headlamps is a new experience: the constricted vision leads to an auditory openness that I don’t normally experience in daylight. Sprinkler wonders aloud at the volume and nearness of the invisible rushing creek when we stop to strip off sweaty layers. After a second hour of gradual but fast-paced climbing, she tells me to stop. “I have to eat something,” she says. She chuckles slightly as she says it, but it’s an annoyed chuckle, and I feel like it’s my fault that we haven’t stopped already. “Yeah, no problem," I reply. We’re farther away from the creek now, so the crinkle of her Pop-Tarts wrapper is amplified like a rustled lapel mic in an empty theater. Even so, it’s quiet compared to the gravelly crunches and pops I create as I chew on dry Grape-nuts. The trees disappear, and we pass the star-lit reflections of Timberline lake and Guitar lake. We start to climb in earnest. The trail is covered in thin sheets of running water. Short switchbacks and turns throw us off-trail for a moment, but we quickly recover. After the first of the long switchbacks, I request another break. I explain to Sprinkler: on my first ascent of Whitney, I ended up with severe altitude poisoning—confusion, nausea, hyperventilation, a complete loss of speech, and eventually vomiting—and I have no desire to repeat that experience. Every two or three switchbacks, we rest again as I catch my breath. The sky is starting to get lighter, and I’m not sure if we’ll make it to the top before sunrise, but there are other rewards for the early start: the milky criss-cut peaks opposite the trail are breathtaking in this light, and the lakes below are portals of scattered stars. At the end of one of the switchbacks, a lone camper bivvies in a flat patch beside the trail. I don’t see a sleeping pad or groundcloth; it looks like he’s put his sleeping bag directly in the dirt. Something seems off about it. He doesn’t stir at all when we pass him. Sprinkler says “I think that was Sherpa,” a hiker who I had met briefly a day or two prior. I remembered him because he was hiking in sandals. “I hope he’s okay,” she says, “he didn’t move at all.” I agree that it seemed kind of weird, but we decide we can check on him on the way back. The sun lights up “the windows,” the large gaps between the pyramid-like spires of the ridgeline, and we know that we’ve missed sunrise. Still, we get at least half the benefit of a sunrise summit as we watch the purple shadow of the earth recede across the Sierra skyline and give way to a radiant peach gilding. The final two miles from trail junction to Whitney Summit is harder than I remember, but we finish about an hour after sunrise. There are people and cell service here. Sprinkler calls her mom, I call Lindsey. I post a short summit video on facebook. We briefly take part in the machine of civilization and stare at our phones. We snack and enjoy the view for a cold, windy hour before we decide to head back down to reality. On the way down, Sherpa is still wrapped in his sleeping bag in the dirt. He has rolled over onto his side, but Sprinkler is still concerned and wakes him. He’s fine, he tells us, he just headed up here late last night, got tired, and decided to sleep in this morning. We’re both relieved that he’s okay. The downhill and daylight make the miles much faster, and we are back by Guitar lake in no time. We take a wrong turn down a side trail and end up near the lake’s outlet. Our options are to backtrack the trail or to head cross-country. I’m for a little cross-country, and though Sprinkler seems a little reticent, she agrees. We climb over rocky ground. It takes a little longer than I expected to find the trail, and I can tell Sprinkler is getting a little anxious. I’m not worried, though—the terrain is open and we’re contained in a valley, so it would be near-impossible to get too lost. A minute later I find the trail, only a little further over than I had expected. We race down the remaining miles to Crabtree Meadows. The afternoon is devoted to napping, but the trees provide scant shade with the sun so far overhead, and it keeps moving. It’s too hot to sleep. Sprinkler gets up and moves her tent several times, but I give up and read instead. A ranger comes by to check our Whitney permits, but allows Sprinkler to keep sleeping after I assure him that she has a permit. I finish “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” shortly before she wakes up.
We pack up and walk a couple miles to our planned stopping point, Wallace Creek. It’s a wide, burbling creek with several campsites next to a meadow. There are already 5 tents set up, and the air is dense with mosquitoes. We consider continuing on, but we’re both tired and hungry, and there are two open sites further down. Our fatigue wins out. The mosquitoes are horrendous, but they seem to prefer Sprinkler; I’m certainly not immune to their attention, but she’s completely swarmed as we set up our tents. I finish first and head up the hill with my bear canister and mess kit in a futile attempt to escape the buggy hell, but I quickly realize that I’ve forgotten my spoon, and return to my backpack just in time to see Sprinkler rubbing Deet on her bare ass. Timing. Dinner is complicated by headnets, gloves, and the careful extraction of rogue mosquitoes who have crash-landed in our food. At any given moment, I have 5-10 mosquitoes hovering near my face. Sprinkler has several dozen. Despite my relative immunity, I race to finish my dinner and retreat into my tent as it’s just getting dark. We both have to take a few minutes to kill the mosquitoes that followed us in before we can settle down to sleep. When I finish, I fall asleep almost immediately. Note: As of this writing, Kris Fowler, aka Sherpa, has been missing for over a year. He was last seen in Packwood and Matches, Washington on October 12th. I know that many aspiring PCT hikers read trail blogs before their trip, as I did. If you are getting ready for a hike in Washington on or near the PCT, please take a few moments to familiarize yourself with the search for Sherpa and help keep an eye out. You can read more about the search here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1841283189418601/about/
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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