Riv's 2015 PCT, Day 16, July 11

Day 16, Saturday, July 11, walked 15.32 mi from PCT mi 1597.25 (Sawyers Bar Rd access to Etna) to Pct Mile 1612.58, elev. 6478. - total up/down: +3206/-2707ft

Dear Trail Companions,

I want to welcome you to the blog site and thank you for making your way through whatever challenges you might have met on what is for many of us a strenuous "high tech" trail in getting here. 

Okay that's done. Now it's time for "poor me." I begin this entry with great difficulty as I sit here at my lunch rest stop, primarily because I have already written two long (probably nearly an hour each!) entries at previous rest stops. But after the last I mentioned not to close the note or put the computer to sleep and somehow the entire entry got deleted while the iPhone was in my pocket. 

And of course the writing I lost was like the fish that got away: such amazing deep moving writing. I have never written and you have never read anything quite as wonderful. And of course given my memory or lack thereof, no chance of recreating it. Which I could not do anyway with integrity since so much of it is written from the present moment about being present -- it's not like one can recreate that. 

So...let us just let it go. The image reminds me of one of my earliest memories of a monarch butterfly we had "raised" in a cardboard shoe box with a gauze cover placed on our piano. When it grew from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, I was permitted to let it step onto my five year old finger and ferry it carefully outside and stand and watch it while it took wing for the first time, and disappeared. 

I usually present photos in the order I took them but it makes beautiful sense to begin with;

Photo 1: I wish I could give you the actual experience. You turn a corner and you are in the midst of dozens of butterflies floating in the air and lighting everywhere. Only -- our theme of transience again -- they won't gather and stay together in one place long enough for a photo to memorialize them. As the "herd" of hikers approaches, I wish I could experience them with the same sense of wonder and transience as I experience this flock of butterflies. 

Photo 2. Me at my first breakfast-rest stop just one mile into the hike. I was weak and tired and hungry (had skipped dinner because I ate so much in the afternoon: an avocado and grapefruit salad (I ate the whole thing -- a big avo and big pink grapefruit), and a Mountain High scrambled egg and bacon breakfast (it was in the hiker box and I was curious whether it would work stove free and whether it might be an option if I do more hiking than planned and can't dehydrate my own food. It actually rehydrated beautifully, taste and texture were excellent. Only I felt almost sick after eating it, as if some additive or seasoning really upset my stomach and my whole system. In fact I had stomach pain for the first hour or so of the walk and I suspected it was the cause, so I guess I won't be using Mountain High meals. )

As you can see it was very thick mist, no distance views. But beautiful in the way mist is. While I was writing the lost most beautiful blog in the world (sob) a hummingbird came whirring out of the fog and hung suspended in the air a few feet from my face as if we were gazing at one another. Then she whirred away and vanished into the mist. 

Photo 3: the morning mist cleared and all day the weather moved back and forth between sun and blue skies and very dark clouds and damp air and cold wind. Predictions of rain varied from 40 to 60 % both for today and tonight. I put my warm jacket and rain gear on any number of times, and took them off again. I love this kind of view of mountains and trees. I love the shades of green. 

Photo 4. The mountain on the left seemed to me to have a fluidity, as did the contours of green in front of it. So I picked it for Bonnie's Wave. There were lots of candidates for Bonnie's Rain Cloud, but I didn't get a photo. 

Photo 5. Dead tree with moss--and those fluid patterns in the growth of the wood I so love 

Photo 6. A splash of color from the wild flowers. Reminds me what an amazing thing color is. In the MIT days, part of the qualifying exam (for the PhD I never finished) was to get to know an area of research and make a presentation. Mine was on the evolution of color -- studying the early single cell organisms that used a variety of colors to capture and use solar energy; they came before the "discovery" of green and photosynthesis. I still think color is a kind of miracle -- its existence, and our ability to perceive it and be moved by it. 

That's all for now -- except one thought from the list blog that lingers in my mind. As the hikers I had become acquainted with in Etna whizzed by me early this morning (and I was slower than usual, feeling at first not quite well, partly I think getting used to the altitude after two nights in Etna at around 3000 ft coming back to over 6000. It takes my body awhile to adjust. I was remembering as they passed a poem I wrote about the racehorse Ruffian who died racing. Her jockey I recall said she loved to run and to win. She was if I remember right an undefeated filly and they matched her against the champion colt and as she ran her leg broke and she just kept running. They had to kill her. In the poem I imagine Ruffian not dying but living a long quiet life. These lines kept repeating in my mind (describing her life)

It is not mostly racing,

Though that rare wild flute fire

Does still blow through.

Mostly you live quietly here

Where one careful footstep

Follows another. 

I think she died around the time Mary died and they were identified in my mind. When I was at MIT, my drugs of choice were coffee, sugar snd chocolate. I drank 10 to 15 cups of coffee in those long often 12 or 14 hour days in the lab, and would go down to the vending machines in the basement, hiding the multiple candy bars I had bought lest anyone witness my level of addiction. I think those drugs fed the drive. I gave them up after Mary died, but I have been using them on the trail where they seem to energize me without doing harm (though when I'm off the trail I find I have to give them up again. ) I think they help me remember Mary, when I feel that urge to keep up with ( and secretly, of course, to surpass and outdistance the other hikers). 

Right now it is cold and windy and I am in my tent. For the first time this hike I zipped my sleeping bag up, using it as a mummy bag instead of a quilt. I also have my fingerless (merino-possum, I love them) gloves on and my little down puffy jacket and my balaclava and wool cap.