The Snow Part I - Rainy Pass to the Border

The only thing that surprised me about Laurie was the fact that she had not visibly aged a single day in the 20 years since I'd seen her last - she was exactly as I remembered her.  We had a few hours in her car together, and we caught up on so many things - she was remarried, she and her husband had been running a major ranching operation, she thought my father had died but wasn't sure how to ask, she had written my mother numerous letters that had gone unanswered because my mother had moved to southern California to move in with my sister...

At one point we drove through a town called Winthrop, and I mashed my face against the window of her car.

"I want to live here!  This is it!  This is the place I've been looking for!"  Laurie laughed.

"Yeah, Tyler and I wouldn't mind being back up in this area."  We didn't even slow the car, but even those few seconds looking out the window were enough - this was where I would go when I finished.

Laurie and I were full of the energy of reconnecting with each other and could have kept it up for many more hours, but before we knew it we were approaching Rainy Pass.

"I can do this," I said, wanting it to be true.  

"Of course you can," Laurie answered cheerfully, "go do it."  This is a woman that I have listened to and trusted for literally as long as I can remember, and somehow as soon as she said it, it became true.  

We arrived at Rainy Pass and found Chris, and Laurie handed me off to him and turned around to make it back to the Methow valley at a decent hour.  I stupidly forgot to take a picture of Laurie or of the two of us together, but I stole this one from her Facebook:

Laurie, who I have known and loved my entire life

The campground must have been federal and been closed because the bathrooms were locked, but Chris set up his tent and we camped there anyways.  We hadn't spoken in the month since I'd gotten belligerent with him and he'd left me in the morning.  We sat down at the campsite's picnic table.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," he answered.

"I brought a half-gallon of Fireball," I said.

"I brought the third season of Game of Thrones on my tablet," he answered.

We hugged, and it was all OK after that.  We never talked about what had happened before, because the present was enough.  We went to sleep in his tent, each in our own sleeping bags but hugging each other for warmth, and he said it was amazing how much warmer his tent stayed with two bodies in it.  In the morning we sat at the picnic table, organizing the food I'd brought.

"I can't believe they locked the bathrooms," I said, "I'm going to go and squat and poop right in front of the building."

"Lucy, do you think that congress will have to come and clean it up, or some underpaid parks employee?"  I agreed, walked out of the immediate vicinity, and dug a hole to crap in.

A bird supervises my grocery organization

We set out around 10:00 AM, and the sun shone.  Day hikers were everywhere, which gave everything an aspect of surrealism - this was so dangerous that 90% of the thru-hikers had quit, but there were ten or twenty day hikers out?  Seriously?  In truth the weather had been so nice since the early snowstorms that much of the snow had melted, and although much remained it had hardened and settled considerably.  

After a few hours we reached a pass and found a snowman, and we sat behind him to eat lunch.

On the other side of that first pass the snow got thicker, and the day hikers dried up.  We were alone, and used our snowshoes for the first time.  The hardest part was actually the narrowness of the packed down trail - there wasn't quite enough room to walk on it in snowshoes.  In flat areas it was easier to walk next to the trail than on it, but in most places it was too steep to do that so we ended up walking with one snowshoe on the trail and the other stuck awkwardly up the hill.  I know that the group who broke trail after the snow had all been in snowshoes but it had clearly melted a great deal since then so maybe that had narrowed the path, I don't know.  

Animal tracks took the place of mushrooms - whose tracks are those?

We only made 12 miles our first day, but we were thrilled - I'd spent the morning organizing and packing and we hadn't started until 10:00 AM, meaning that if conditions didn't change drastically we'd be making 15 mile days.  Chris had told me to bring enough food to make as little as 10 miles a day and had done the same himself meaning that unless we slowed way down, we could eat as much as we wanted to.  We also hadn't realized how beautiful it would be.  I'd gotten used to the rain and clouds and fog obscuring every view and had then spent a week and a half walking up a highway, where there were no views to speak of, and suddenly here I was, back in the mountains, the snow making them more beautiful than I could possibly have imagined and the sun shining down on them.

Before I'd agreed to come and meet Chris I'd made him promise to finish the road walk with me - specifically, I wanted him to walk between Wenatchee and Stevens pass so I could have continuous footprints between Mexico and Canada, and had added the last 15 miles before the Canadian border on Highway 97 to that when I'd left before finishing it to come and meet him.  But that night in the tent, he had other ideas.

"If it's going to stay like this, we can just hike the trail between Stevens and Rainy and get you done." 

"I was thinking the same thing!"  And just like that, my hike was a hike again.   

The frosted plants looked pretty cool.

The butt of a porcupine - I know it's not much of a picture, but it was a pretty exciting wildlife sighting for me.

Mexico is back that way.

Me looking maniacal...

...and downright crazy.

I love this picture because it captures a little of Chris's personality in it.

These washouts were a major feature of the trail on one stretch - Chris took some better pictures of them (with me in them for scale), I'll include one of those somewhere.

On the second day we did 18 miles to get into the campground at Hart's Pass.  Hart's Pass was only 30 miles from the border and the last point on the PCT that cars could access.  Some hikers finish the PCT without a passport and after reaching the monument turn around and hike the 30 miles back out to there and I'd met a few hikers who were planning to do that, although I'm not sure if any of them ended up finishing.  I suspect it was probably also a place where people skipped up to after the snow and just hiked the last 30 miles into Canada, but of course I have no idea how many did. 

There was a small building identified as a guard station there, although we had no idea what its occupants would have been guarding if it had not been empty because of the government shutdown or maybe simply because of the season.  Even if I had asked him to Chris would not have broken into the cabin and we would not have spent the night indoors with a Coleman lantern, a wood stove, and a supply of firewood, enabling us to dry all of our clothes.  If we had then we would have cleaned up behind ourselves before left, even swept the floors, and finally Chris would have worked the eyebolt to which the padlock was attached back into the door frame he'd worked it out of and we would have spent the first few minutes of our day's hike laughing about our ethic of "leave no trace breaking and entering," but of course we did none of the above. 

Chris getting water from a stream - it was really hard to stay hydrated in the snow, much harder than it had been in the desert, because it was so hard to force ourselves to drink cold water.

Ice crystals pushing up pieces of dirt and looking an awful lot like mushrooms

This contraption was designed to collect samples of some kind...

...It looked like it had collapsed but we couldn't even tell what it had originally been...

...Although I supposed I could just call and ask.

If we'd been closer to town I swear I would have stolen this sign.

An example of a stretch too narrow to walk easily in snowshoes and too steep to walk off of the trail.

Chris on a steep descent

The scariest parts of the trail were definitely the steep descents, I made them painfully slowly and Chris waited patiently every time.  I think it was the third day when we crossed over a pass and were descending without our snowshoes when I placed one foot a little ways to the side of the packed down trail.  I did it because the surface that was packed down was slippery, but the surface that wasn't packed down was exactly that - not packed down - and on one step I postholed hard.  The hillside was steep enough that I couldn't maintain my balance under the weight of my pack and I fell forward, swinging around so that I was laying with my head pointed down the hill, hanging by my leg which was still stuck in the posthole.  Chris was at my side in seconds.

"Are you OK?"

"Yeah, I'm actually not hurt at all."  The problem was that I couldn't right myself with the weight of my pack, but if I took it off it would slide down the steep hillside, and I'd spend the rest of the day retrieving it.

"How can I help?"  I asked him to just hold my pack and keep it from sliding down the hill, and I'd get myself out of the hole I was stuck in.  He didn't even wait for me to unbuckle the pack, he had it off of me in seconds, and I righted myself without much grace but without much drama either.  After that I did a better job of staying on the packed down trail.  Chris had a pair of generic yaktrax that his mom had bought in a three-pack at Costco some years earlier and I tried to wear those in some of the icier places where snowshoes would have been too cumbersome, but the design of the yaktrax was such that they wouldn't stay on my foot for more than a few minutes at a time so I just resigned myself to traveling as slowly as necessary.  Chris was considerably more agile than I and seemed to navigate the same surfaces just fine in his hiking boots, despite the fact that his pack was so heavy I could barely lift it.     

I think this is looking back on the pass that I fell coming down off of, but I'm not 100% certain.

Chris was hoping that snowball would get bigger and bigger as it rolled down the hill, but it didn't really work.

More tracks - I have absolutely no idea what kind of animal might have made them.

On the third night we were laying in the tent, watching Game of Thrones.  Chris passed me a little plastic bag with some peanut M&Ms in it, and I'd eaten a few before I felt a sudden pain.  I thought that a piece of one of the M&Ms was just stuck in my gum, but no amount of flossing would dislodge anything.

"Fucking M&Ms.  Fucking snow.  Fucking Washington." 

These things were pretty cool - I don't know what creates them,...

...but there were a whole bunch of them in this one spot.

More tracks - any ideas?

My snowshoes and my brother's sailboating pants

Chris takes my picture right after I just fell down

These tracks should be easier, but I'm still not sure what they are...

...I think these are the same ones, they show up a little better here.

Late the next afternoon we stopped for a snack a few miles from the border, and I finally figured out what had happened in my mouth.  The M&M hadn't lodged in my gum, it had split my tooth.  One of my teeth on the top right side was split all the way up to the gum, and was now two completely separate pieces both attached firmly to the root.  Chris didn't even believe me until I got him to stick his hand in my mouth and wiggle the smaller inside piece.  The larger piece was big enough that it was still stable and could probably still be used as a tooth, so I figured I just needed to pull the small piece out.  I went behind a tree to pee before yanking it out.  Chris stood on the other side of the tree, and used logic.

"What if you pull it out and expose a nerve?  I mean, you're not dying from it now, right?  You ate today."  I realized he was right, and left it alone.  Since then I've chewed everything on the left side of my mouth and occasionally something sneaks over and tweaks it, but for the most part I'm fine.    

The area right before the border is the absolute most unkempt part of the entire 2,660 miles of the trail.

We reached the monument on the evening of the fourth day, and walked to the large campground on the Canadian side.  We set up camp and then walked back to the monument in the dark, where we took slugs of the last of the Fireball I'd carried from Rainey Pass in celebration.  Chris had earned it, having just finished his thru-hike, but I still had the 125 miles between Stevens and Rainy to go so for me it felt pretty hollow. 

I'm inadvertently pointing to the hole in the crotch of my rain pants...

...It wasn't intentional, but it looks pretty funny.

In the morning we broke camp but left our backpacks there while we hiked back to the monument again to take pictures in the light. 

Look beyond the monument on the right - that shaved strip is the border between the U.S. and Canada.

Yes, Chris actually hiked the entire trail with a tripod - homie don't do no ultralight.

I just have to take a selfie everywhere but my god, look at the bags under my eyes.

 

I was so proud of Chris for finishing his thru-hike and tried hard to be happy for him, but I didn't do a great job of being happy.  The sight of my puffy face in the my pictures finally set me off and when we got back to the campsite to collect our packs I sat and cried for a good five minutes.  Chris came and sat with me and put his arm around me.  

"It's OK, we'll get back down to Stevens and hike the rest of your hike."  

"I'm so sorry Chris, you should be getting to celebrate here, and I'm ruining it."   

He assured me that I wasn't ruining anything but I felt so guilty - he should be getting to celebrate here and instead there he was, comforting me through my tears.  So, I blew my nose, dried my face off, forced a smile, and we hiked out to Manning Park. 

I love the pink tape that says "escape route" - escape from what?  Is there any other route out from there?