The Road - Wenatchee to Tonasket

I do get back to the trail later, but this stage in between was really intense for me and determined the way I finished in the end, so I think it's important to include it in my personal story.  Be warned that it's just a lot of melodrama and no real hiking, though, so you may want to skip it and wait for the next installments when I get back to the trail.

Baring

In Skykomish I drank a hot toddy while my photos uploaded to dropbox on the bar's WiFi, and then I called the Dinsmores.  Jerry and Andrea Dinsmore are a couple who live in Baring, a tiny town a little west of Skykomish.  I would come to love them but at this point I knew them only from the guidebook, which said that they will pick hikers up from Skykomish if the hikers can hitch that far.  Jerry Dinsmore answered the phone and said that his wife was already in Skykomish picking someone else up.  He said that he would call her cell and told me to walk over to the store and catch her there, and when I did I found that the other person she was picking up was Hippie.  Hippie had also gotten pretty hypothermic and had come out the earlier Deception trail, and each of us was pretty relieved to see the other safe and sound.

The Dinsmores Hiker Haven, as they call their bunkhouse for hikers, had a large wood stove, bunks and reclining chairs, a TV set and a large collection of DVDs, and shelves of loaner clothes and a table of hiker boxes full of food.  There were so many hikers there that they spilled out into Jerry's workshop, where several had set up places to sleep, and the day after I got there a group even relocated to a cabin in Skykomish in order to make more room.  The Dinsmores said that their normal request that hikers limit their stay to two days was not in effect, and that as many hikers as needed could stay as long as they needed to.

Shady Acres becomes a leprechaun

Sierra Bum dressed as GI Joe in the Baring General Store

First Man and Solstice on a bunk in the Hiker Haven

I'm not sure how to describe the mood, but was intense.  The rainstorms had turned to snowstorms throughout most of the trail in Washington.  One of the dominant feelings was frustration - we had all come so far, and now it looked like we might not be able to continue.  We knew we were at fault, too.  Yes, the storms came earlier than they had in a century, but I know everyone was thinking about how many zero days they had taken, and how if they'd only partied a little bit less and hiked a little bit more, they'd be done already.

There was also worry over the safety of others.  Everyone who had headed north out of Stevens Pass in the past few days had found the trail impassable and turned back except for one hiker, a Japanese man named Taku, and no one knew where he was.  The snow had hit all the way into Oregon and south of us Search and Rescue had rescued one couple but were still looking for a young woman who went by Rocket Llama and a man who had been out spelunking for the day.  They were hoping to find the thru-hikers alive but were just looking for the spelunker's body - he had no camping gear and they knew he couldn't have survived even the first night.

Maybe the strongest feeling was the stress of indecision - just not knowing what was possible given the conditions, and not knowing how those conditions would change.  The locals all agreed that once the snow hit that hard it was winter, and if this had been any other year that they could remember, they would have been right.  Most of us had no experience hiking or camping in the snow.  I'd been on one snowshoeing trip with my friends from Coos Bay but we'd walked well-packed trails during the day and slept in a cabin at night, and I think the experience levels of most of the other hikers were right about at that level.  Days went by, and everyone who left came back.  Even Legend, and older hiker who had left before I arrived and seemed more determined than any, came out a side trail after making it halfway to Stehekin, saying that he just couldn't move forward fast enough in the conditions.

The one thing I knew I needed to deal with was my inability to stay dry.  I called my brother Sather and asked him for help with rain gear and also with warm gloves, since my little wool glove liners had completely worn through on both thumbs.  Another hiker named Cookie Monster and I caught a ride out to Seattle together and got dropped off at the flagship REI where my brother drove down and met us.  We hugged and he gave me his rain pants that he wore on his sailboat, a pair of ski gloves, and a smartwool sweater which was warm but thin enough to carry.  The two jackets he had brought for me to choose from were both heavy so he took off the rain jacket he was wearing and gave me that too.  Finally he gave me the cash in his wallet, and drove Cookie Monster and I to the train station to catch the last bus back to Stevens Pass.  I didn't even think to take a picture of my brother since he is, after all, my brother, so I just stole one from his Facebook account:

My brother Sather

Before we left I returned my shoes for a pair of actual hiking boots and bought a pair of waterproof socks.  They weren't really waterproof (I don't think anything is) but they were definitely water resistant, and I would be glad for them much later when I actually hiked in the snow.  REI has a one-year, no-questions-asked warranty on everything they sell, so I was thrown for a loop when the sales clerk came up with a fairly creative reason not to take back my Keens.  I'd only had them for a month and the right shoe had disintegrated on the inside heel down to the plastic (remember the horrific blister in the last post) so I thought it would be pretty straightforward, but she threw me a little curve ball:

"Those are wet," she pointed out.

"Yes, they are," I said, articulating the obvious in case there was any confusion, "It's raining outside," but resisting the urge to add "This is Wash-ing-ton."  

"They can't be returned wet," she replied, looking at them in disgust, "You have to take them home and let them dry out, and bring them back tomorrow."  I looked at her, cautiously attempting to confirm that she was serious.  She caught my look and added "It's a health issue."

I explained that I would not be near an REI tomorrow, that they were my only pair of shoes and couldn't be left indoors to dry while I roamed barefoot in the rain, and reminded her that everything that REI sells is guaranteed for one year, period, with no caveats.  I told her to find a plastic bag and I would put the shoes in it for her so she didn't have to touch them, but she refused.  And then I remembered - it's not about logic, it's about attitude, so I just hunkered down and said that I would wait until she was ready to take them back, and I had my refund applied to my new boots and waterproof socks within minutes.  She made a show of being unwilling to pick up the shoes and I reiterated my offer to put them in a plastic bag, but she shook her head dramatically and fetched a pen.  She grimaced and curled her lip for emphasis as she attempted to slide the pen through one of the laces of each shoe without touching either, and extended her arm completely and contorted her body back as far as possible as she moved the few feet to the counter behind her to deposit the shoes.  Now that I had my refund I found the performance entertaining, and I slipped on my new boots and tried to relate the story to my brother and Cookie Monster as we walked out of the store but probably failed to do it justice.

Cookie Monster (right) plays chess with another hiker whose name I can't remember

Of all the hikers at the Dinsmores, Cookie Monster seemed the most skilled and was definitely the most well-equipped gear-wise.  I asked him if I could hike out with him when he left and he said yes so I watched him and waited, but his next move was to have his snowshoes overnighted to him from a friend that was storing his gear.  On the day he decided to hike out I had a chance to get a ride to Monroe with Jerry Dinsmore and buy snowshoes at the Big 5 there.  I figured that it was better to go and get the gear I needed than to go without it and try to keep up with someone who had what I should have, so I went west with Jerry while Cookie Monster headed into the mountains.

Monroe was a turning point.  New Orleans, a hiker from South Africa who I'd known for months and who had decided to walk up Highway 97 with Hippie as an alternative finish, went with Jerry and I to get a pair of shoes for road walking.  She found some and I bought snowshoes and snow gaiters, and we walked over to the Home Depot to wait for Jerry where we had agreed to meet him.  I felt so upset and so stressed that I couldn't even attempt to hide it, and New Orleans asked me what was wrong.  Starting to cry, I told her everything that was in my head.

I told her about the book The Perfect Storm, and the rescue diver who had died trying to rescue those three assholes in the sailboat, who were just recreating and too stupid to turn back.  The diver had left a young wife who was still visiting a psychic a year later when she was interviewed for the book, saying that it was possible that her husband was still alive having drifted very far and washed up on some coast, and that the psychic was picking up his energy somewhere near the coast of Norway or something like that, and that her husband had been so strong, it was possible that he was still alive... A Search and Rescue guy had already broken his leg rescuing that hiker couple to the south of us and I didn't want to be the people in the sailboat.  What if I made some woman a widow because I was too stupid to understand that I couldn't handle the conditions?

I also told her about Mzia Mikeladze, the head of two Georgian university departments who I had taught a class for when I lived in Tbilisi.  Mzia was only 50 when her heart stopped beating, and she died in a taxi.  It's custom in Georgia (the country, not the state) to display the dead body of a family member in the house for three days.  During those three days people come to the house and walk a circle around the body, both as a way to say goodbye to the dead and also as way to show respect to the family.  My boss Koba knew Mzia, and he came into my office.

"Lucy, most people here didn't know her so I'm not taking the entire office, but I know you worked for her, so I'll take you with me if you want."

I'd liked and respected Mzia so I thanked him, and that afternoon we drove across town to her family's house but we'd arrived late on the third day, and they were already carrying the body out of the house.  Six men carried the coffin, and the huge crowd milling around outside the family's apartment building parted to let them through.  Behind the coffin a woman who can only have been Mzia's mother walked, wailing, and the sound she made tore something out from inside me.  I realized right then and there that the best we can hope for each other in this life is that we bury both of our parents and none of our children.  What if my mother had to bury me?  What if I did that to her because I don't care enough to protect the life that she gave me?

New Orleans was practical.

"It doesn't sound like you're comfortable with the decision you've made."

I agreed and when Jerry showed up I asked him to drive back to the Big 5 so I could return my snowshoes.  He said that nothing would make him happier, and off we went.  I felt an immediate sense of relief and was sure that I'd made the right decision, and this was reinforced that night when Steamer got a text from Cookie Monster that he was camped safely but had been postholing even in his snowshoes, had only made five miles all day, judged the danger of avalanche to be high, and was headed back first thing in the morning.  Probably half of the hikers around had already gone home and not even Cookie Monster could make it through the snow, so joining New Orleans and Hippie for the road walk seemed like the best decision at the time.

Why was I taking a selfie indoors? 

The Dinsmores got Officer Paul Rohrbach, who led local Search and Rescue operations, to come and talk to us one morning and warned us all that attendance was mandatory.  Hikers had begun to talk about the "vortex of fear" that we were all trapped in and people grumbled about the lecture that he would give, but once he got there and started talking he won us over pretty quickly.  He said that he'd always wanted to hike the PCT and that if he'd come that far he probably wouldn't agree to quit either, and that he wasn't sure what to tell us.  He pointed out a few dangers that I hadn't been aware of, but admitted that he himself in our positions probably would not quit, and we could feel how much he loved his job.  The most immediate physical danger was that of avalanche, which was doubly resonant in light of the text we'd just gotten from Cookie Monster.  It was something I hadn't thought of before that, thinking of the challenge being only in how fast we could move through the snow carrying as much food as we would need to make it through at that pace.

Paul also said that the spot tracking devices that many hikers had come to rely on wouldn't necessarily work in an intense storm (it would be difficult for them to communicate with the satellite) and that Search and Rescue wouldn't fly out after hikers in a helicopter while visibility was low anyways because they would be putting themselves in too much danger.  I wondered how much the spot trackers had changed the level of risk that people were willing to take, and if a general sense of "if it gets too bad I'll just push my spot" made people hike out into riskier conditions than they would have traditionally.  I've personally never carried one but I knew many hikers who did and even knew of at least two who had even pushed their emergency buttons and called in Search and Rescue when they really did not need it, one because she got scared that a cougar was stalking her and another because he was "stuck" on a mountain, which people said basically just meant that he was out of food and far from town.  I'm not sure exactly who pays for rescues either and I think it varies by state (although spot does sell an insurance policy so they pay for some), but I think there are a lot of interesting issues here.

On the subject of being rescued, while we I was at the Dinsmores, Andrea Dinsmore saved a life.  Since the weather had gotten bad she had started requiring hikers to fill out forms before leaving her house, and these forms included information like ETA to Stehekin, the colors of your tent, jacket, and other pieces of gear, and the phone number of your next of kin.  She'd kept track of everyone and most had either simply turned around and hiked back south to Stevens or evacuated on side trails, but there was a Japanese man named Taku who had done neither.  Andrea confirmed that he had not showed up in Stehekin to pick up his resupply package, and then used the PCT Class of 2013 Facebook page to ask all of the other parties who had hiked out where they had seen him last and what he had been doing.  She compiled this information and told Search and Rescue not only that there was a hiker missing but where to look for him, and they listened to her.  Taku waved his jacket as a flag when they flew over and they rescued him, cold and nearly out of food but unharmed.  When I would return to Stevens Pass a few weeks later to get back on the trail Andrea would be scheduled to give a presentation to Search and Rescue that they had invited her to give on how to utilize social media to locate missing persons.  Looking back on this, I've now walked the PCT from Mexico to Canada, and she's saved a life.  Who really accomplished something this summer?  I don't think it was me...  

Officer Paul Rohrbach (center in jeans) speaking to hikers. To his left is Legend, a hiker, and to his right is Jerry Dinsmore.

Hikers listening to Officer Rohrbach

Golden Boy decided to join Hippie and New Orleans and I for the road walk, planning to meet up with his sister further north and finish with her either on the trail or on the road.  The section from Stevens to Stehekin had been the hardest hit by the storms and while no one had made it through there since the storms, people had made it to the border from points further north, so most of the people who weren't quitting outright were skipping up as close as possible to the border so that they could at least hike to the monument and take pictures there.  I wanted to try to walk as much of an unbroken line as possible and didn't see the point in getting to the monument if I hadn't walked the entire way there, but even we were hitching out to Wenatchee to start the road walk.  Everyone said that it would be incredibly stupid to walk down Highway 2 with its twists and turns and slippery conditions and no shoulder to walk on and I'm far more fearful of cars than I am of avalanches, so I didn't take much convincing there.

We had a final breakfast at the Baring General Store, snapped a few goodbye photos with Andrea and Jerry, and then stood in front of the store and stuck out our thumbs.

The general store in Baring

The front half of the store is a restaurant.

Andrea and Jerry Dinsmore

I thought it would be impossible for four hitchhikers to get a ride together, but within five minutes David had stopped his big rig and we were loading in.  

A view of Stevens Pass out of David's truck

David!

David was on a day run to pick up hay east of the mountains and drive it back west but he had taken a truck outfitted for longer runs, so there was an empty bed in the back of the cab and the other three loaded in while I sat in the front passenger seat.

Hippie, Golden Boy, and New Orleans in the back of the truck's cab

David was working in and had grown up in Lynden, which meant that we had attended high schools that had played each other in sports, although he was young enough that we hadn't gone to school at the same time.  Still, I cracked him up with my description of the Lynden girls basketball teams wiping the floor with my teammates and I, and I thought of how very close this all was to the place where I was raised.  Later we passed streams where we could see salmon spawning, and that feeling intensified.  It had faded completely by the time we reached the Okanogan Valley, however.  The rain and snow and even the clouds were gone and we were back in the desert, not literally but it did feel that way, as we'd been suddenly transported to a completely different biome instead of walking gradually out of one and into another over the course of days.  

Let the road walk begin!

The Okanogan Valley

We spent a day and a half walking from Wenatchee to Chelan.  Our new world was surreal.

Walking out of Wenatchee

The views were a little different.

We tried walking the tracks instead of the highway for awhile, but the two who had never walked tracks before found it intolerable.

Wildlife?

These reminded me of the Caucasus Mountains

Golden Boy with the Columbia River in the background

On the second day Golden Boy had had enough and hitched out to try to deal with his package in Stehekin.  He and his sister and a number of other hikers had had their passports sent to Stehekin, their last mail drop before the border, and were now looking at skipping up past Stehekin and getting to the border without a way to get back into the U.S. if they crossed it.  To make matters worse the post office in Stehekin had stopped taking phone calls, and the word was that the postmaster was only accepting written forwarding requests.

I hugged him goodbye and kept going, well behind Hippie and New Orleans.  The only scary part was this tunnel,

The tunnel

...which had literally inches between the edge of the lanes and its walls.  There was a button you could push that would make lights flash at cars on either end of the tunnel warning them that either a pedestrian or a bicycle was inside.  For the better part of my way through cars slowed and moved around me, but I'm not sure what happened towards the end.  Either the lights didn't flash for very long after the button was pushed or the driver of one particular semi didn't care, because the 18-wheeler tore past me at full speed, not giving an inch.  I hugged the wall and it missed me by what seemed like about six inches, and I longed for mountain lions, which more people are scared of but I think are far less likely to kill you.

Entering the tunnel

A mile or two after the tunnel I was walking along when a huge, black pickup truck pulled over onto the shoulder in front of me and stopped.  I couldn't see in through the front window and was scared so I did the only thing I could think of, I walked down off the pavement and into the grass beside the highway, walking a wide circle around it.  I tried not to look at the truck but when I caught it out of the corner of my eye, I saw that it had "SHERIFF" painted on the side.  A wave of relief washed over me and I beelined back towards it, figuring that I'd just need to explain to the cop what I was doing and show that I wasn't in any terribly altered state.  The front window was down and when I got close enough to see inside another wave of relief washed over me - it was Paul Rohrbach, the Search and Rescue sheriff.  I ran the rest of the way to the truck and leaned in the window, grateful for the company.  Paul wanted to get a sense of how many hikers were road walking, how many had quit altogether, and how many had hiked out of Stevens Pass.  I filled him in as best I could and he gave me a few apples from the bag in his front seat, and when he said that he really needed to go I removed myself from his window only reluctantly.

Wildlife!

Hippie and New Orleans made better time than I did and I had just reached Lake Chelan when Hippie called me from the town of Chelan another five miles or so away.  She'd gotten ahold of a friend who lived nearby in Manson and who had invited us to stay at his house, and they came to pick me up.  The friend's name was Monty and he had thru-hiked the PCT in 1977.  This blew my mind for several reasons, not the least of which was that it was the year I was born.

Monty!

I don't remember this man's name, but he was so cool...

Monty treated us to pizza and then the girls went back to his house to get some sleep before the next day's walk, but I went out to the local bar with Brent, who had served us our pizza.  A large group of hikers would be leaving Chelan in a few days to walk the road to the border in costumes, and I thought that the bigger group and the costume theme would make it a little more bearable.  There would also be a support vehicle which would mean that we could walk on the pavement without carrying all of our gear, which sounded great after even just a day and a half of carrying everything on the hard pavement.

Brent!

I spent the next three days in Manson, getting a costume together for the road walk and attempting to dull my crushing disappointment with alcohol.  I called friends and cried about what a failure I was.  In 2013 I'd been fired from my job, dumped by each guy I'd dated, and uninvited to play a role in my family that I'd thought I was really needed for.  I recounted hiking along thinking "what next?  Is the earth itself going to reject me?  Is it going to revoke the laws of gravity only for me, and send me flying off into space?"  And now it really had rejected me, only with snow instead of with weightlessness the way I had imagined it.  One friend, Tom, was completely alienated by my attitude during that time and hasn't communicated with me since.  Others sent me money to help with my transition back into real life, and I just left it in the bank and drank and tried to drown my feelings, which never works.  

Trying on my costume in WalMart

Being a bug in a bar

While I was there they gave up looking for the lost girl with helicopters, and put together crews of volunteers to go in on the ground.  She'd been missing for quite a few days now, and the situation seemed less hopeful.  I remember her father posting on the Facebook page that there was good news, the helicopter had seen tracks believed to be hers, and my heart ached for him.  But on one of these days a man was out riding his motorcycle on logging roads, and he happened across a girl.  She asked him how to get out to a proper road and he told her, but warned her that she still had quite a ways to go.  He left her and kept riding, but began to think about the Search and Rescue vehicles he'd seen earlier, and thought about how the girl seemed a little dazed, and he started to wonder if there might be a connection.  He rode his motorcycle to the Search and Rescue crew and described the girl and they told him that was exactly who they were looking for, and he told them exactly where she was.  He raced back to her on his motorcycle and waited with her until they arrived, and that's how the first picture of the hiker girl lost for a week in the snowstorm happens to be one of her standing next to a dirt bike.  The girl's trail name was Rocket Llama, I don't know her real name, but she was 23 years old and saved her own life.  I haven't read her recounting of the adventure but as I understand she'd stayed camped near the trail for days hoping to be rescued and then concluded that she wouldn't be, at which point she'd followed a creek downhill until she hit the logging road.  She also rationed her food to the point where she walked out of the woods with enough to eat for another week, making her a pretty big hero in the eyes of everyone involved.  I found the picture with the bike in another trail journal, and here it is:

Rocket Llama and the bike

After three days the road walking crew still hadn't arrived, and I called Delaware Dave.  I'd met Delaware six months ago in Warner Springs, where we had both been shown the used toilet paper of another hiker and then had spent a night at Warner Springs Monty's (see blog post from Warner Springs).  He'd suffered a stress fracture but had purchased a car and was running support for his now girlfriend Cream Tea (who I'd hiked around between Bend and Olallie) and Andy (who had let me stay in his room at the Timberline Lodge).  They'd only gotten as far as Snoqualmie by the time the snowstorm hit, but that had turned out to be an advantage because the John Wayne Trail led down out of the mountains from there and Cream Tea and Andy had hiked down it to the Okanogan Valley and were still walking a continuous path from Canada on their way to join the costumed road walk party.  They were planning to get into Wenatchee that night so I took a bus down to meet them, and when I got there Delaware had gotten an invitation for the four of us to stay at the home of two former thru-hikers who lived in town.

Chad and Statia were firefighters who had thru-hiked in 2012.  They were both on furlough because of the government shutdown, and they not only opened their home to us but served us a beautiful dinner at which we all sat around talking about life on the trail.  I imagined being in the same position as they were, nostalgic for the PCT and wanting to pay forward some of the kindness that had been shown to them, but they had finished the trail, and what was I doing?

Chief (Statia) and Cookie (Chad)

Cream Tea took the next day off from walking because the pavement was killing her legs, so the three of us drove around in the car while Andy walked.  I warned them about the tunnel and we met Andy in front of it and drove slowly behind him while he walked through so that he wouldn't have any unfortunate experiences with semis.

Andy walking through the tunnel

We camped that night in Chelan, and the rest of the road walking group showed up with costumes.  In the morning we got dressed up in our silly outfits and walked out of town, stopping at the Safeway to buy balloons.  

The organizers of the costumed road walk (left to right) - Kitten, Focus, Dance Party, and Skedaddle

The road walk crew (left to right) - Cream Tea, me, Focus, Andy, Kitten, Skedaddle, Dance Party, Kazu, and Wonderer

Starting out with balloons

It was all right and good, but my heart ached and it felt wrong.  One thing that bothered me was that I had just jumped from Stevens Pass out to the valley.  Cream Tea and Andy had walked down from Snoqualmie Pass, making the transition between the cold mountain rain and the sunny Okanogan Valley gradually and on foot, the way thru-hiking transitions were supposed to be made.  The four who had dreamt up the costume walk had also driven down from Stevens, but they had at least made an attempt to hike out from there on the trail.  They had posted pictures on the facebook page of themselves wading through waist-deep snow, which they had done for half a day before deciding that they couldn't physically carry the amount of food necessary for the amount of time it would take to get to Stehekin at that rate and had turned back.  I, on the other hand, hadn't walked a continuous path from Canada.  I hadn't actually gone out and tried walking in the snow myself.  I hadn't done anything, except hitch out Highway 2.

What really killed me, though, was to see on the Facebook page that the weather in the mountains had cleared, the snow had settled, and that a group of people had left Stevens Pass and hadn't come back.  They were people I knew and liked, including Sweet Tooth and Hot Tub, and I could have gone with them if I'd only waited it out another week.  Why had I left?  What had I been thinking?

We ran into Frosty and Goldilocks, a couple that I'd met all the way back in Big Bear.  They had been on the last leg when the storms hit and had finished with the group that broke trail from Rainy Pass after the snow, and he had proposed to her at the monument.  They were success and I was failure and as kind as they were, it hurt to look at them.

Posing for a picture with Frosty and Goldilocks, a couple who had finished the trail just as the snow had started

Nearing the town of Pateros

An article came out in a local newspaper with a picture of New Orleans and Hippie.  I only skimmed the article but the reporting seemed accurate, portraying the road walk as a way of not giving up on completing the walk from Mexico to Canada.  Another article published a few days after this one said that we were protesting the government shutdown.  This idea may not have been invented out of thin air, but may have been arrived at by twisting one fact into more than it was:  When the snowstorms hit a lot of hikers had made it as far as Stehekin or Rainy Pass, and more people were holed up there than were at the Dinsmores.  From Rainy Pass there were lower-elevation trails that ran to the border including the Ross Lake Trail, which a number of hikers tried to hike as an alternate to the snowy PCT.  This trail was closed as a result of the government shutdown, and hikers were actually turned back from it, including Kazu, the Japanese girl who was part of our road walking group.  So, the combination of the weather and the government shutdown had actually prevented some people from finishing the trek in the mountains.  None of us were protesting this, not even Kazu, but it may have had something to do with the source of the misinformation.  At any rate, the results of the article weren't devastating - some people would ask us what we were protesting which gave us a chance to explain what we were doing, but most people simply greeted us in a friendly way.  I thought it would be funny to carry a banner saying "just say no to snow," but not quite funny enough to make it worth carrying.

New Orleans and Hippie in the local newspaper

Interestingly, one hiker who hiked the Ross Lake Trail despite the closure got himself into a little more trouble than he had bargained for.  Coincidence, who I'd hiked with from Walker Pass to Kennedy Meadows, had snuck around the rangers who were turning hikers back.  He'd walked to Canada and crossed the international boundary where that Ross Lake Trail intersected it.  However, since no one was supposed to be hiking through the area because of the shutdown no one informed the Canadian government that they might see hikers popping into the country on this trail as a result of the weather, and the permits we all carried to enter Canada were valid only for entry via the Pacific Crest Trail anyways.  It just so happens that the Ross Lake area is a route for drug trafficking, so when Canadian authorities caught Coincidence on their side of the border, they arrested him.  He was taken to Vancouver in leg shackles, and only the next day after some higher-up had heard the story and had ordered his subordinates to let the hiker go immediately was he released.  In the end he got a free ride to Vancouver, a free night's stay with meals, and a free ride down to the border, but the leg shackles must have felt like a little much.

We spent one night at the home of Splash and her grandmother.  Splash had thru-hiked southbound five years or so earlier and she made an amazing meal for a huge crowd which included ribs and ratatouille, which is full of my favorite vegetables and is now on my list of things to learn how to make.  For an activity at dinner we went around the table and each gave our names and a little information like where we were from, and every person's information generated questions from the crowd.  One of the guests at dinner was Splash's boyfriend, whose trail name was Dash so that together they were "Splash and Dash."  Dash, who I somehow ended up without a picture of, lived in the next town to the north and invited us all to camp at his place the next night, so that we were doubly hosted and were all incredibly grateful to them.  Part of what united Splash and Dash seemed to be their mutual love of outdoor activities (they were avid runners and hikers and even took Delaware Dave canoeing one day while we walking) in a place that didn't have much of a community in that regard.  I asked Splash about this and she said that Winthrop was the closest place that had a real outdoorsy scene, and I thought about finding this characteristic in whatever place I would live when I finished the trail.

Splash (standing) with her house full of hikers

Kitten somehow managing to look tough while wearing a dress and a dalmatian hat

Kitten and Focus posing in front of a "no trespassing" sign - we couldn't figure out if it was supposed to be in German above and in Spanish below, or if it was meant to be in English and Spanish and the creator of the sign simply couldn't spell.

Focus getting a little air

Chad and Statia surprise us with some Halloween candy trail magic

People were really incredibly kind to us.  Chad and Statia drove up from Wenatchee one day see our costumes and give us candy, and later that day Frosty and Goldilocks brought us coffee and beer and snacks.  While we were clustered around their car a woman stopped her car on the other side of the road, and walked over.  She explained that her name was Melinda, and that she was a member of the Colville tribe.  She said that among the Colville sweetgrass is traditionally meant to bring luck on journeys, and that she had read about ours and had brought us some.  She presented us with a long sweetgrass braid and I think that everyone probably felt like I did, like it was a beautiful gesture that we maybe didn't quite deserve.

Melinda of the Colville Tribe gives the group braided sweetgrass for luck on the journey.

Frosty and Goldilocks

We passed all kinds of interesting-looking properties, and I wondered what was going on in each.

What does the Mallot Improvement Club improve?  Is it for self-improvement?  Improvement of the town?

Les McClelland and Dance Party - Les had been a fighter pilot in China and Burma, and offered us hospitality.

I don't think it's a big mystery how Dance Party got her trail name.

Posing in front of a map of Washington

Despite everyone's kindness, I felt worse and worse.  Why hadn't I stayed on Stevens Pass?  I could have hiked out with that group, but instead I was here, doing something that felt now felt completely wrong.  One day I bought some cheap malt liquor and drank it out of a water bottle while I walked.  Then I bought some more, and then some more, until I became a problem that everyone had to take care of.  They did take care of me, but they were pretty disgusted.  The next day I made apologies to two people but neither went very well, and I ran out of nerve to make the rest of them.  So, now I'd managed to completely alienate myself from the group I was with, walking in costumes on a highway through the Okanagon Valley - let's just say it was one of the lower points in my life.  My god, I hope it's one of the all-time lows, because it was pretty low...

Okanogan Valley fashion

The new WalMart nearby had closed every business in this town.

Awww.....

The Wonderer meets a goat

The hospitality continued - I honestly don't think we spent more than one consecutive night unhosted the entire time.  While Chad and Statia and Splash had all thru-hiked the PCT and Dash was very familiar with the trail, the last house that we stayed at was a degree of separation from thru-hikers.  A young guy named Wojciech who had thru-hiked this year had previously done ridden some long-distance bike-touring route that had taken him through the Okanogan Valley.  A website lists people who are willing to host the bicyclists on their way through each area, which is how Wojciech had first come to stay with Ivetta, who had begun hosting bicyclists when her son made the trip.  Ivetta had hosted many bicyclists but had more or less adopted Wojciech, who was currently living in her house and helping her with a big remodeling project.

Wojciech had thru-hiked northbound very quickly and had finished when it was still hot out, but he had originally planned to do something more - he had planned to "yo-yo," which is hiker terminology for reaching the border, turning around, and hiking back to the border at which you started.  For me it would be impossible - I just don't move fast enough to get two thru-hikes done in one season - but as I understand it has been done by numerous people.  

Dinner at Ivetta's

Ivetta!

We'd been walking almost exactly 20 miles a day; road walking was far less intensive than hiking but because of the hard pavement it was actually harder on our legs and feet.  On our last day before the border we planned to camp at a campground in Tonasket, and then to walk the last five or so miles to the border in the morning.  I called Chris (Man in Black), crying.  I'd called him for the first time the day before - before that we hadn't spoken in the month since he'd left me at Shelter Cove, but I just needed to talk to him.  I cried about having wasted so much time taking zero days, about having left Stevens Pass, about having failed.  He said that he hadn't actually finished either, he'd gotten as far Rainy Pass and was on his way out to try it again.  He said I could come with him if I wanted.

"I'll need two days - I need to finish walking to the border, and then I'll need another day to hitch back down to Omak, get snowshoes at the Big 5, and then hitch out the 20 to meet you."

"Lucy, I can wait a day, but I can't wait two - I just don't know how long the weather's going to hold."

I decided that I'd walk the rest of the way to the border that night and then try to hitch south, but then something happened.  There is a woman named Laurie Miller, who I've known literally as long as I can remember.  She taught me to ride horses when I was six years old, and she sold my parents and I both of the horses I've owned.  She was strict enough that we always did what she said but not strict enough that we feared her, which is a fine line to walk.  She is the mother of Josh Thompson, my childhood friend who I stayed with in Reno.  She now lives in the Methow Valley, and we had been texting about how I would visit her there after I got to the border.  I was somehow messaging her at the same time I was messaging Chris, and she said

"Why don't I just come up and get you?  We can get the snowshoes, and then I can leave you at Rainy Pass."  I hadn't seen her in 20 years.

"Laurie, that's so much driving for you - it's too much."  She laughed.

"I'll be there in an hour and a half."

I told Delaware Dave and he drove me to say goodbye to the rest of the road walking crew.  No one hugged me (and I couldn't blame them after what a headache I'd been) but we wished each other well, and then Delaware drove me to Tonasket to buy enough groceries for the hike before Laurie picked me up.  I gave him a little gas money (more than he wanted to take but less than I probably owed him), and then we hugged and he left me and my groceries to wait for Laurie.  I was headed back to the trail, to try to hike through the snow.

My last picture before leaving the road walk.  It's also apparently the only picture I have of Delaware Dave (far right here), which is too bad because he was a major part of this week.