LEFT: Hiking crew in their natural state...Note that they couldn't even get off the trail to pass out cold!
We awoke this morning refreshed, but still in all troubled by the impedements to our trip...Joanna's feet, our lack of mileage, lack of elevation acclimation and our food overage. Cliff and I had a long talk in the tent about how to handle things; we were especially concerned about Joanna. She had the stamina to make the trip, but with her feet torn up so badly on day 1, we seriously doubted that she could ever make the 8 days. Hamburger's tough to hike on. And, once we got in, we're in, with the only way out hiking back out. We discussed whether one of us should hike her back out now, while we were only a day in, or whether we should have everybody hike out, and just spend the week doing day hikes with the group, instead of one big hike.
Additionally, we were already 5 miles down from our day 1 goal, only getting in 9 miles instead of the planned 14. We had based our mileage plan upon our prior year (Lake) Tahoe Rim Trail hike, but clearly this terrain, altitude, and pack weight was a very different beast altogether. Whereas we had numerous days over 20 miles at Tahoe, it seemed like 10 or so was probably what we were going to accomplish here, at least in the early days of the hike.
So, decision time. Do we (1) hike back out, either with just joanna or with everybody, (2) keep on going but make it a shorter loop without Mt Whitney, our trip goal (albeit we had very few alternative routing options), (3) hike to Whitney, come out the East side of the sierra's, and then try to somehow manage logistics to get us the 300ish miles back around to Road's End on the West side (hitchhike, steal a car, horseback/yak, jump a train, piggyback ride on Cliff...). After chatting it over with the whole group, we all felt that we would foresake Mt Whitney, for the sake of getting in a whole week backcountry hike, assuming we could get Joanna's feet through it. Whitney would still be there for another time, and this week backcountry would give us serious training and knowledge for another attempt. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.
So, Joanna dropped a roll of duct tape on her feet, along with various ointments, and away we went, deeper into the mountains. No turning back now!
As we came off the 10,000 foot avalanche pass, we came upon a group of boy scouts, apparently waiting for a priest to come by get them their "pedophile victim" merit badge and...no wait, different blog....anyhow, they were out for a week also, but were doing it via resupply. Their resupply had not come in, and they were out of food. WHAT LUCK....WE HAVE COUS-COUS FOR YOU!!!!! So, we dropped (literally) 15 lbs of cous-cous off with them; they were thrilled (probably never haven eaten cous-cous before I suppose), we were thrilled (less weight, less cous-cous), and the scat-eating critters were thrilled, as cous-cous makes you blow out like Mt St Helens. Win-Win-Win all around! Karen of course tried to stuff 2 of the cuter ones in her pack for "use" later in the hike, but we were able to release them while she slept.
We're headed towards Colby Pass next, our first 12,000 peak. It's a long hike (1 1/2 days), with 7,000 ft of elevation in front of us, but at least cous-cous was behind us. And as they say, no cous is good cous.
Lumpy out
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