Road (Detour) Sodas
Tonight (May 19), Charlie and I are at the Pickle Branch Shelter at mile 698 after covering just over 10 miles today. We woke up this morning after another very long and rainy night.
And at some point during the night, maybe between like one and three, we could hear a very active pack of coyotes. It was crazy, just lying in my tent in the dark with the rain coming down, listening to a bunch of coyotes.
We gave thanks to Mother Nature that it wasn't still raining when the time came to get up and get moving, and the weather actually looked like it was clearing up. Charlie and I packed up and were on our way by about 7:30. And it was a fairly uneventful mile-and-a-half hike down to a road crossing, where we saw a sign notifying hikers that the bridge over the stream we were coming up to was out, so we would have to ford the stream. And since it's been raining quite a bit of late, and especially last night, we figured the odds were strong that the water was going to be pretty high.
We decided to check it out, so we hiked down there, and where the bridge had been was clearly not a good place to cross. The water was very murky and moving quickly, and it looked pretty deep. Some other hikers went upstream a bit and found a place they felt they could ford, so we waited to see how things went for them. It looked pretty good up to about two-thirds of the way across, but then in the final third, the water was waist deep.
Charlie and I agreed that the best possible outcome of trying to cross the stream there would be spending the rest of the day totally soaked from the waist down. The worst outcome would be falling and getting completely wet — or really even worse, getting swept downstream or losing some gear. So we decided to take the suggested road detour. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of traffic. I mean, these roads are out in the middle of nowhere.
And by the time we got back on the trail, we’d hiked about six miles. If we’d been able to stay on the trail, it would have been eight miles. So we basically lopped off two miles. As we were getting back onto the trail from the road detour, we ran into a guy called Trout Creek Jason, who was handing out a little Trail Magic. I guess he does this pretty regularly. Charlie helped himself to a Coke and seemed pretty happy about it, and I grabbed a Sprite.
From there, it wasn't very far to the next shelter, Pickle Branch, and we just decided to call it a day when we got there, even though it wasn’t too far past lunchtime, mainly because the next shelter down the trail was pretty far away. Also, water wasn't very abundant. So we felt like we should take advantage of having had a bit of a shorter and quicker day and use the extra time to try to dry everything out and kind of hit the reset button and get ready for a big day tomorrow.
Tomorrow is going to be Dragon's Tooth, which will be really nice. With any luck, we'll have good weather and maybe even get some cell signal. We haven't had that for a while now, and it’s getting to be very frustrating.
