October 15, 2017
Miles 718 – 702
In the morning, my water bottles had frozen water and were covered in frost! I took a photo so that Liz could see what frost looked like. I grew up in Chicago, and I would often tell her about how Jack Frost will come to frost curly patterns on your windows in the winter. She’d never seen how frost forms all kinds of pretty patterns. Here, I had frost making patterns in my water bottles. And the water in the bottles had become solid ice.
I made hot oatmeal again this morning. Afterward, as I was rinsing the pot with water and it was so cold that the water froze as I was rinsing it out. I wiped the pot down with my bandanna, and instead of wiping water, it turned instantly into ice. My fingers also hurt like they were freezing into icicles. My toes were hurting from the cold and I had to stomped around camp while eating my oatmeal. As soon as I was done eating and packed up, it was time to get moving to keep my toes from falling off!
Back in May, the Monarch Meadow had been snow-covered. There had been no trail to follow. I remember hugging the side of the meadow along tree cover to keep a general direction of where I was supposed to go. Now the meadow was a dry, golden brown.
I reached the Kern River. It was now a calm, quiet creek.
Next was the burn area that I had hiked through during a hail storm. In May, I had tried to camp here just as the sky turned to night and the rain became pelting hail. It was windy and I was in the worst possible place to camp, a place surrounded by dead trees swaying in the windy. Two hours later, I got up to hike south back to Kennedy Meadows, then settled for a less rainy spot under a thorny lilac shrub.
After the burn area, I entered lower elevation and started to see desert plants. The flowers here were in full bloom, carpeting the trail with lots of yellow. I think it might be a desert shrub called rabbit brush.
As I descended in elevation, I encountered lots of little flying bugs! Yep, I was now back in the high desert. Gnat territory. After a while of blowing them away from my nose and mouth, I stopped to put on my bandanna. I tried to get a photo of how they were hovering over my face, but they moved away when I got my phone out.
The trail crossed the Kern River again at a wooden bridge just before reaching Kennedy Meadows campground.
At Kennedy Meadows campground, I met a trail angel who was supporting southbounders as they were coming south on the PCT. He was sitting in a camp chair when I reached the campground and offered me water, fruit and snacks set up on his truck bed. What a treat to meet a trail angel this late in the season! I took a Kit Kat and a banana and thanked him for being there.
I continued onto Kennedy Meadows, reached the main road, and headed toward the General Store. As I was walking, guess who I ran into? It was the quick-footed Puddin’! She had reached Kennedy Meadows the night before and was on her way back onto the trail. She told me that Cowboy Coffee and Captain Underpants were still at the General Store. I gave her a hug and wished her well on the rest of the SoBo hike. That Puddin’ is so fast, I just knew that she’d make it to the Mexican border.
As I approached the General Store, I was surprised to receive the applause given to thru hikers. The local neighbors of Kennedy Meadows were hanging out on the store porch and giving the thru hiker welcome. When I got close enough, I told them that I wasn’t a SoBo, but a NoBo flip flopper who already passed through here once in May. They said they would clap for me anyway.
Cowboy Coffee and Captain Underpants were at the store’s outdoor deck having food and beers. The grill had already closed, but the store owner offered to cook me up some food anyway. I got to order both a hamburger and a hot dog and bought a root beer from the store.
This time around, Kennedy Meadows had a cabin for hikers to stay in. It wasn’t open back in May, but it was now open for us to stay indoors. The cabin was behind the store and just uphill. It was still under construction and had just exposed wooden floors, but most importantly, it already had insulation in the walls to keep us warm. There was an entryway room, a main room, and two other rooms. One other hiker joined us for the night, so there were now four of us in the cabin.
The cabin didn’t have electricity, so we moved about with our headlamps as the sun went down. Cowboy Coffee had a really bad cough that sounded like it was coming from his lungs. Captain Underpants told me that he’d had the cough for weeks. It sounded like bronchitis, and he should really get off trail to rest, but Cowboy Coffee wanted to keep hiking. He said he was taking antibiotics, but his cough sure didn’t sound good. Captain Underpants had a blister that had gone bad and had turned into an infection. He was planning to get a ride from the trail angel at Kennedy Meadows campground to skip to Walker Pass. He planned to hike at a slower pace while his friends caught up to him.
From their conversation in the dark, it sounded like the High Sierras had been tough in October. They had been in below freezing temperatures and terrible weather. One hiker said that when he got to Muir Hut, he was so fed up that he screamed and cursed at the top of his lungs.
When I first got to Kennedy Meadows in the late afternoon, I had called Liz to tell her that I was done with the trail and to come and get me whenever she could. I planned to just stay perched at the general store for as long as I needed to until she could drive up to get me. I had been hiking with a sharp headache for the past three days which become so bad in the afternoons that I would get queasy with nausea. I had been having recurring, chronic angular chellitis, cuts on the corners of my mouth caused by nutritional deficiencies, for the past month. And while the idea of walking home on familiar trail had sounded good in theory, it turned out that it just wasn’t exciting to be covering ground that I had already covered just a few months ago. It felt a little ridiculous to be hiking on a part of the trail that I’d already done. What was the point? It felt really pointless.
Now, better rested, better fed, and lying in the warm cabin with three other thru hikers, I wished I hadn’t called her so quickly! Now that I felt better, I felt like I could have another go at the trail. Just like they say, “never quit on a bad day”! But Liz was now on her way to Kennedy Meadows first thing tomorrow morning. She had even taken a day off work to get me. I decided I had to just stick with my new plan to head home for now.
I went to sleep feeling a little disappointed that I had chosen to leave so soon.
Trail Meandering 