The terrain today was something quite different from anything we'd seen on the trail so far. Like the deep woods of Maine, it was lake after lake after lake of varying sizes all day, with many separated by no more than a tenth of a mile or two. Perhaps not surprisingly, with the advent of so much standing water, swarms of mosquitoes were not far behind.
Search Results for: lakes
Mammoth Lakes
Fifteen miles feels considerably shorter when visions of hamburgers dance in your head. Sleeping next to an alpine lake at over 10,000 feet, no one was surprised that a blanket of cold had settled in to replace the comfortably warm evening of the night before.
Lakes of the Clouds
Well, my good luck with the weather in the Whites has apparently met its end. Walk On and I ascended the unrelentingly steep climb from Crawford Notch to Mt. Webster and up into the clouds near Mizpah Hut and the start of the Presidential Range. Had a great lunch at Mizpah out of the weather with a bottomless bowl of soup and all-you-can-eat brownies, all for the grand total of $3.
Tumanguya
The buzzing on my wrist comes as no surprise. In those brief moments drifting in limbo between asleep and awake, I struggle to register what exactly it is floating above my head. Beyond the soft armor of mosquito mesh surrounding me, and through the tarp stretched taut above, an amorphous shape of white bends into unrecognizable shapes and patterns, like sunlight seen from beneath the surface of water.
The Golden Staircase
The confluence of two creeks, a mere stone’s throw from our proverbial bedroom window, seemed not to care that morning had broken. Nature’s white noise machine chugged along, ignorant of day and time. The alarm on my wrist was more particular about exactly what time it was, and its buzzing was as inescapable as the reality it brought with it. Everything ahead of us was in one and only one direction: up.
Uncharted Territory
To wake with the realization that you’re not on the trail you’re supposed to be, might normally be cause for alarm. But in this case, it was by design.
Mysteries, Revealed
Morning broke with a chorus of crashing water and overlapping birdsongs, melodies and harmonies, calls and answers. To hear these as the first sounds of morning, and then to open your eyes to the scenery you’d almost forgotten in your dreams, is very nearly the definition of waking up in paradise.
A Tale of Two Winters
The Sierra Nevada—literally, “the snowy mountains”—has recently begun to challenge its very name. In the past twenty years or more, the cyclical nature of snow and sun in these mountains has become anything but cyclical.
Troubled Horizon
When dawn broke, it started by touching only the tops of the mountains surrounding our camp, before spilling down the flanks of granite to where we lie in our hammocks. It was nature opening the blinds.
A Banner Day
From our perch on a hidden bench above the trail, the same soundtrack that had lulled us to sleep was now the first to greet us. There’s something a little comforting about it. That while you’ve been asleep, the gears of nature have kept turning, almost completely unchanged. That everything is, by all appearances, exactly the way you’d left it the day before.
Skill Short #1: The Figure 8 Wrap
Whether you’re dealing with wired headphones at home, or guy-lines and ridge-lines on the trail, there’s an antidote for all of your cord headaches: the Figure 8 Wrap. It’s simple to learn, and can be the difference between pitching your shelter in record time during a downpour and struggling to untangle knot after knot.
Rocky Mountain Wall Art
The Rocky Mountains. Perhaps no mountain range better resembles the image of the American west. Soaring spires of granite, vast alpine landscapes of lush greenery, and hidden lakes that serve as reminders of their glacial origin. The Continental Divide Trail (CDT) affords a front row seat to it all. From the snowy San Juans of...
Rust and Relaxation
I’m never quite sure. That’s the problem. You’d think 10,000 miles of trails would have clarified an answer to what is otherwise a simple question, but here I am. Having taken not one but two zero days in Flagstaff, the question remains: is a day off more likely to rest weary legs or accumulate rust upon them?
Hidden Masterpiece
A person could get used to this, even in spite of the weather. The familiar pitter-patter on the roof of our tent at 4am sounded hesitant, almost apologetic, as though it knew that the clouds it brought with it would obscure nature’s masterpiece. The masterpiece we’d so looked forward to seeing.
Reunion
It feels like a long time since we’ve had a hiking day like this, absent a place to be and a schedule to keep. In truth, we did have somewhere to be but with only 11 miles of sweet, sweet National Park trail between there and here, it felt about as leisurely as things ever get out here.
The First Law of Hiking
The rain is deafening. Inside the spacious shelter of Taylor Lodge, nestled into the shadow of Mt. Mansfield, the sound is amplified by the metal roof making each drop sound like the beat of a snare drum. Lying in the dark, it’s hard to know whether my ears are being deceived by the acoustics or the downpour really is that heavy.
So Long, September
The last day of September. Somewhere along the way, summer slipped into the distance without us hardly noticing. The cold nights of the past few weeks heralded the start of autumn, but with the return of cloudless sunshine and 70-degree weather it feels like the perfect time to be out hiking.
Cirque
How could it end like this? A day of jaw-dropping scenery reduced to a twilight scramble over a nearly impassable jungle gym of blowdown. But in the interest of not burying the lead let's rewind and get to the good part first.
What About Bears?
Remember this post? Yeah, me neither. Aside from navigation, it's true that questions (read: fears) about bears seem to be at the top of most people’s minds, but the reality is I’d be sorely disappointed to hike a long trail without seeing them. Having seen bears perhaps a hundred times in the wild, I can say with certainty that it never gets old.
Back to Basics
Only a day and a half removed from when we stepped off the trail and into some rest in the town of Pinedale, yet returning this morning it felt like something subtle had changed. Fall, it seemed, had arrived almost overnight. The meadows were a touch more golden, the bushes surrounding lakes a brighter shade of autumn yellow…
The Strife We Choose
True story: I haven't showered in 9 days. That’s not real hardship, actually. Had I not stopped to count I wouldn't have given it a second thought. The trees that began to appear strewn across the trail in great piles, however, had the feel of a much more tangible kind of hardship—for the forest, for the dedicated Forest Service personnel tasked with clearing it, and for the trail system itself…
Stone and Smoke
Of all the mountains I've spent time in, two have held a particularly special place: the High Sierra are in my heart, but the Adirondacks of my home are in my blood. What we'd see today had me wondering how much room I would need to make on that list for the Wind River Range.
Yosemite East
Did we miss something? Not five minutes down the trail from where we'd slept, it looked like a great hand had swept through the forest and toppled everything in its path, both the living and the dead. What looked like perfectly healthy trees, some several feet in diameter, lie one upon the other like match sticks that had spilled from their box.
America’s Backbone
Not humid, but something masquerading as that. Close. Like the air had taken on a new quality, one that bound it more tightly around you. My tiny brain sought out some sort of explanation but found none. All I knew was that I was hot, and I had a salt stained shirt to prove it. This is why I guzzle electrolytes like I own stock in Gatorade and Pedialyte.
Rookie Perspective #3: A July in Colorado. My Top Eleven.
The last time this rookie wrote we hadn’t even started hiking in CO yet. And, here we are, just three days (less than 70 miles) from the New Mexico border. I have a lot more miles under my belt, but don’t worry, I’m still a rookie.
No Thanks, Thunderhead
I thought we were done with this foolishness. If there was one thing we had no interest in seeing, it was yet another storm cloud to start the day. The forecast certainly made no mention of them, and yet there it was, dominating an otherwise azure sky, pouring rain on the valley below and now chasing us down with alarming speed.
The Legacy of Water
Its fingerprints are all around us. The lingering patches of snow that still cling to the coolest of high alpine corners. The lifeblood of the thick carpet of tundra-thriving grasses, bold enough to color such a forbidding landscape with their flowering blooms. Even the glaciers that long ago sculpted the waves of stone we've called home for these past 6 weeks.
500 and Counting
It sounds like a reasonably long distance when I say it out loud. I can't even tell you two cities that are roughly 500 miles apart, but if I could my next suggestion would certainly not be to walk from one to the other. That's what planes are for.
Brutality, Embraced
Over a long enough time horizon, eventually everything becomes hard. Beliefs questioned, patience tested. On the Continental Divide Trail, there's a saying: “Embrace the Brutality.” We all knew adversity was coming in some form or another, it was merely a question of when. I don't think any of us thought that day 3 would bring the first abject lesson.
The Mountain that Blew its Top
Four months before I was born and a small, towheaded terror was introduced to the Brownscheidle household, an altogether different sort of terror was unleashed on the Pacific Northwest not far north of the Columbia River that divides Oregon from Washington.
The Five Senses
Sandwiched in between the snowy Crystal Range to the west and the parched Carson Range to the east, Lake Tahoe sits as the second deepest lake in the country and somewhere deep within its inky blue waters lies the California-Nevada state line.
Desolation
Returning somewhere that holds a special space in your memory can go one of two ways—either the anticipation proves too great for the reality to live up to the recollection or the memory is renewed and reaffirmed. Today was most certainly the latter.
The End of Newdle-palooza
Little did I know how close we were. Our hammock spot last night was a mere few hundred yards from the junction of where the Tahoe Rim Trail joins the Pacific Crest Trail for a 50-mile stretch through the mountains along the west side of Lake Tahoe.
Evolution
It took me a moment to recognize what I was looking at. Scattered flecks of grey and white were sprinkled on my hammock as I went to turn in last night, and it was then I realized that the smoke hanging on the horizon that had given us such a scarlet tinged sunset had also given us these little flakes of ash. It was odd to have that connection to something happening so far away.
Persistence of Memory
Up the stairs to the fifth floor, a collection of Impressionism, surrealism, and cubism masterpieces adorns the starkly white walls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Nestled among Monet’s famous Water Lilies triptych and Pollock’s massive drip painting canvases hangs a work of a very different kind, scarcely larger than a piece of paper.
Reflection
The scattered rain drops landing on my face as I slept came as somewhat of a surprise. The thought of rain was a fairly distant one in the forecast, but nonetheless there they were, falling through not only the netting of my hammock but the nearly 100 feet of cedar fronds directly above me courtesy of the two 3-foot diameter trees I was hanging between.
46
Sleep has never come easily to me. Years after the Appalachian Trail I’d still occasionally turn over in the middle of the night and reach bleary-eyed for the headphones on my nightstand to plug them in and listen to one of the few sounds that would bring an end to my rising anxiety if not to my sleeplessness: rain on a tent.
Final Alternate
Leaving the hotel at Snoqualmie Pass, the sky was blue in every direction and the night's cold had coated low-lying pockets of vegetation with a fine frost. We had decided to take one last alternate, and like a couple of the others we've taken, we'd again follow the course of what was once the original PCT, this time detouring towards Goldmyer Hot Springs.
Quiet Reflection
Tearing myself away from a cozy bed was made only slightly easier by the fact that although the clouds still hung in the sky like unwanted guests it at least was not raining. As this grand adventure nears its home stretch, I've noticed that comfortable town stays like last night bring my mind closer to the home that awaits me when this incredible hike comes to a close.
In the Heart of the Cascades
It stretched into the distance as far as I could see. With my back towards the Three Sisters, Mt. Washington, Three-Fingered Jack, and Mt. Jefferson towered over what looked like a boundless expanse of nothing but volcanic rock. Wave upon wave of fields were piled high with the stuff.