Oops or Opportune? - Day 314

  Tremendous day today, but I'm beat. Just a mile into the walk, I came to this. This is a major obstacle, because the walk around adds two miles, and I had already planned on a full day.


Hiker, Jason, was just coming back from checking to see if the bridge was really closed. It was. So we agreed to walk together to get around to the lower crossing.


Here's that river, Baptism River, from the road crossing.


By the time we got around and back to the main trail, we'd learned that we know some of the same hiker people, that he has big hike dreams, that we walked at a very similar pace, and that I have a piece of equipment he can borrow just when he was thinking he might have to abandon his current hike for lack of this item. We agreed to stay together the rest of the day.

It was a tough but spectacular day with lots of steep, rocky climbs. This is the view to the north from Mt. Trudee. In the previous days, I've walked over most of those humps.


This is looking southwest with some wetlands along Palisade Creek.


It is a holiday for some people, and the trails were extremely busy. Most people we saw were climbing up to the overlook to Bean and Bear Lakes. You can see why they make the climb.


When we got a little farther, we could look back and see where we had been only a few minutes earlier.


We were almost done, passing a campsite, and a man was sitting there. I thought, "That looks a little like Harlan." It is Harlan! He is a long-time (since 1996) trail friend. I just saw him at the conference last week! He's camping for a couple of days then going to join a volunteer work group for the next week.


We had hiked long hours, hard hours with lots of hills and rock scrambling, and the sun was getting low. The final crossing of Beaver River was on a big bridge with no issues, and Annie was there to pick us up. (I'll get a picture with Annie later.) Hooray! She brought food and drinks, and the perfect attitude of flexibility to deal with hiker needs. We are settled in Sunny, and Jason is in the house. It's all perfect.


Nothing like jumping back into big-time miles!

Miles today: 14.9 that count (plus about 2.5 that don't). Total miles so far: 3616.2.

See Glorious Autumn!