Tale of the Trail: Snowslide Lakes

This is an account of the hiking trip I took last weekend.

Friday July 19th
We drove to the Canyon Campground on the Big Smoky River by way of Fairfield, ID on Friday afternoon, arriving close to 4pm. For the first leg of our journey, we planned to hike out to Skillern Hot Springs. The very first backpacking trip we took together was to Skillern, and it would be a conservative estimate to say that we took 3 hours to traverse the 2.5 miles from trail head to camping site.

I rocketed out and arrived in 63 minutes, while Ambrose came in at a still-respectable 93 minutes. Although treadmill training had not prepared me for actually being out on the trail, I do feel that it has allowed me to learn better pacing. I have a much better sense now of what it feels like to go 3 miles per hour up a 15% incline - it's a lot faster than I used to think.

We quickly set up camp and got ready for the night. As dusk was falling three hikers walked up to the camping area and Ambrose directed them to the open site in the back. We had taken the one in the front, because he likes it better. I like the stones that are pushed into the rough shapes of couches near the front fire pit, even though every time I sit on them I manage to get sap on me from the tree they're propped against, and this trip was no exception. I had a sap spot on my pants the entire trip.

It wasn't easy to fall asleep that night, in part because the guys in the back site were being quite entertaining, running around with their shirts off, throwing knives at tree trunks and inflating a huge air mattress with a pump that they'd carried out. Our style of camping is much more weight conscious, and the idea of carrying out a pump and an air mattress got me laughing hard enough for tears to run out of my eyes. They brought tears to my eyes again when they started a fire directly upwind of us, but I fell asleep eventually, knowing that the alarm was set for too-damn-early o'clock.

Saturday July 20th
I was totally spoiled this trip by the high night time temperatures, and I realize this. Waking up before the sun rises to 45 to 50 degree weather is downright luxurious for backpacking. That doesn't stop me from whining about it though, because no matter how relatively warm it is outside, inside my sleeping bag is a cozy heaven of warmth that I have no desire to leave. But I've been crabby in the mornings the last few times we had gone out and I made a decision not to be that way for this trip. I kept to it. Mostly.

I changed clothes and prepared my gear a bit for leaving, then got out into the chill air and started breakfast while Ambrose did water duty. Breakfast on this trip was the same every day: first a batch of instant latte mix coffee, and then dehydrated eggs with bacon, grits, Spam and cheese sauce powder. We never bothered to rinse the latte mix remnants out of the pot, partly out of laziness and partly because why waste the precious extra calories?

It always seemed like more than we could possibly eat, and yet, we somehow managed not only to consume it all, but be hungry again in just a couple hours - must have something to do with the weight of the packs we were carrying up, and up, and up the trails. Mine weighed in around 35lbs, and Ambrose's was about 42lbs. Along with my personal gear, I carried the cook kit and half the food, while he took the tent.

We've been doing training hikes since summer started, but in those training hikes, we would go out and make camp, and then do a day hike the next day. While it got our bodies into better shape, it didn't prepare us for the strain that packing up your whole camp every morning provides. It is far more difficult when you have to leave the spot you've just slept and find a whole new one, that you hope has good water and flat, soft ground and not too many biting insects and no bears.

After breakfast, we finished packing up and got onto the trail. The guys in the back spot didn't stir a bit from our commotion. Ambrose said they had been up til 3am, and I supposed they weren't planning on going anywhere like we were.

We had never gone beyond the hot springs on this trail, and it was exciting to see the terrain beyond them for the first time. We followed the Big Smoky River, with the trail meandering now closer, now farther away from the rushing water. I ranged ahead, but always kept Ambrose in sight, or earshot. We both wore bear bells on our packs that gave our steps a merry jingle.

Ambrose was counting the stream crossings that we did in order to find where our trail junction would be. The problem was that there were far more stream crossings than the map indicated. Some were tiny little seeps just wetting the trail, others slightly bigger flows that could still be stepped over easily. Then we came upon a big one. The choice was to drop packs, switch to crossing shoes and ford it, or go upstream and see if the log falls would support us across.

The 5 Stages of Backpacking

1. Anticipation
You cannot wait to start this trip. You've been waiting all week (month, year) to go backpacking and the time has finally arrived, you're at the trailhead. Sometimes the adrenaline pulls you through the first heave of that pack onto your back, and you can carry this happy eagerness onto the trail itself. Other times, you go directly to:

2. Regret
You realize, either after you put your carefully packed pack on, or perhaps during the first big climb of the day's hike, that your body is not ready. No matter how much time you put in at the gym, or how many hikes you do in a season, your body sees fit to remind you that this is actually hard work you're engaging in, and you've only just begun. You think longingly of the car keys stowed in the wheel well, you could turn back and just drive home, to air conditioning and toilets with running water, but you keep marching forward, leading you to:

3. Grim Acceptance
There's only one way you're going to be able to get a rest, and that's by making it to the campsite. Sure, you can stop on the trail, even take the beastly pack off for a few minutes, but there's no camping early, not on this trail, not when your hiking partner has the tent and has zipped off ahead of you. You feel it in your aching hips and shoulders, the quads that scream in protest at yet another uphill section and the hamtrings that whimper at that next downhill. The only way out is through, step by step by step, an inexorable rhythm that might lead you to:

4. The Zone
Your body is a well-oiled machine, cruising up hills with an easy speed that passes your partner up and hardly leaves time for him to eat your dust. You laugh at the downhills, breaking into an easy jog. Every breath is intoxicating - this is what you came out here for, the exhileration of being outdoors, in the wild, carrying everything you need on your own two feet. Your pains are just background noise, subordinate to the pure joy coursing through your body. If you're lucky, this carries you through to camp, but if you aren't, or you forget to eat enough, you fall into:

5. Exhaustion
Your feet have acquired an extra 20 pounds of weight. A piece. With every step, your toes catch rocks, jarring your aching calves and knocking the enormous pack weight around on your back. You've almost fallen five times, and have fallen twice. Picking yourself back up felt like an effort that should be rewarded with nothing less than the Nobel prize, even if you did have to take your pack off the second time. Your partner passes you up again. You think he might have just joked about seeing a bear, but he's gone before you can muster the strength to question him. At this point, being eaten by a bear seems like the least painful of your options.