Red’s Meadow Resort to Duck Creek crossing. 18 miles.
Waking up after a night in a real bed was both easier and supremely more difficult. We felt refreshed, but it was hard to walk away from some of the comforts of home, knowing what we were walking back out into!
Walking out the door and starting our hiking by 6am, it was still nice and cool, just like our plan. As I mentioned before, the beginning of our hike would involve several miles of climbing out of the canyon through an exposed burn area, and then up and over a couple of ridges. Basically, a lot of climbing. The plan was to get through the exposed areas before the sun hit full force.
I felt strong. I was still amazed that, despite all the hiking, there hadn’t been a single morning that I had woken up with muscle soreness! After a long day hike, it’s pretty normal for me to have leg soreness, but I was grateful at how my body was adapting to the continual beating I was giving it. I also realized that, even though I was still sick, I felt significantly better than I had in previous days. It was about freaking time! As we climbed, I kept a slow, but steady pace. I wasn’t even stopping for breathers, just one foot in front of the other. Omar, still ahead of me despite my improved pace and health, had stopped and was waiting for me. When he asked if I was doing OK I replied that I hadn’t stopped once yet. With a surprised look, he immediately said ‘well, let’s keep going!’. We both recognized the rarity and wanted to take full advantage! As it turned out, I needed to stop only a couple minutes later, to re-tie my shoes – I felt a hot spot coming on, and, as much as I didn’t want to mess with my momentum, a blister would only make it worse later on!
After that, we started to climb in earnest – moving from the burn area to a tree-covered ridge with plenty of long switchbacks. Finally making it to the top of this section, I realized how quickly (relatively), I had made the climb! I was still a little out of breath, but it seemed that my asthma was finally acclimatizing a bit! I did an internal happy dance. At least I had something positive to focus on, which was nice considering the scenery was changing very little, and likely wouldn’t for most of the day. Thankfully, bookworm Ally had read the Wenk JMT book thoroughly, and knew that there is a 5 mile, uphill stretch with no water, so we filled up at Deer Creek, and moved on towards Duck Creek. By the time we got there, a bit earlier than anticipated, I did some quick math to see what our pace had been. We had about 6 hours of hiking time, and, according to Omar’s GPS, had gone 18 miles. That’s 3mph uphill! I am getting stronger! Even with my mileage according to the map, it was 14 miles, which still equated to something far quicker than my hiking pace up until this point.
The afternoon was actually very laid back, a nice gentle easing back into trail life after our one day mini-vacation at Red’s. Omar hid from the mosquitoes in his tent, and they actually left me alone. So I took the opportunity to sun bathe! What a luxury! I took the time to think about what we had done so far. We had survived an entire week in the wilderness. Considering the most time I had spent in (highly populated) back country to this point was one night with two days of hiking…I was pretty proud of myself. My cold was going away, so I had survived that. My lungs were feeling marginally better. We had hiked nearly 100 miles (at least according to Omar’s GPS) up and down along the Sierra’s. It seemed like ages ago that we were in Yosemite!
Later we would see Nina and Grace, and they set up camp near us, as we were in a really popular area. We figured we wouldn’t see Joey since he said he couldn’t handle such a long mileage day right after his epic journey from Thousand Island to Red’s. While setting up camp, we saw a couple wispy clouds, so I said we should put our rain fly on. I was becoming quite the meteorologist – if there were any clouds in the sky later than 2pm, chances were it would rain at some point. I only mention this because it did rain in the middle of the night. And it seems no one else had the foresight to put their rain fly on! We both slept through it, but later heard there was a huge shuffling about as everyone woke up to rain and had to grab their headlamps and scurry to protect themselves.
So there’s the lesson for the day folks – better to be safe than sorry, and always remember that summer Sierra weather is unpredictable at best!
Tomorrow would be focused on more climbing, and getting as close to the base of Silver Pass as possible, so we could be up and over quickly the following day!
