update!
This was going to be a really short email. It was going to say, “And then I went hiking on the Wonderland Trail for eleven days and it was fantastically gorgeous the end.” But then Peter showed up with a rented viola, and it all went downhill from there. (And when I say downhill I mean that in the purely metaphorical sense, because let me tell you - there was a lot of elevation gain on this trip.)
Also, I am at University of Michigan, and I will tell you about it, but I have to do this first or I will forget.
My parents and Crazy Dave (whom you may remember from previous updates as one of my dad’s hiking buddies - you know, puts extra rocks in his pack to add an extra “hardcore” element, all of this post injury-requiring-several-stitches. He summited Mt. Rainier earlier this summer. Anyway.) We arrived a day early, before the hike began, set up camp, ate rehydrated (Moroccan?) stew for dinner (my parents and Crazy Dave’s wife Ruth and Jeanne Ellis spent weeks and months preparing and testing dehydrated food that rehydrates well. I think this was one of Ruth’s and it was delicious.)
It was also freezing cold, and buggy, and continued to be both freezing cold and buggy the next morning when Bob Ellis (one of my high school teachers and father of high school friend Peter, for those of you who don’t know) showed up with Peter, Lewis (another high school friend) and Hilary around 7:30. Everyone but Bob was asleep in the car, and as we began unloading the trunk Bob handed me a familiar black case.
Bob: We brought your viola. Go on, play something! Wake ‘em up!
Me: …You brought a viola?!
Bob: Just for you!
Turned out Peter, who majored in cello performance and is deeply involved in the Seattle Music Scene, thought 11 days without his cello was too, too long, and had rented a viola to keep in practice. Which he intended to carry all the way around Mt. Rainier.
We woke the sleeping beauties, shivered through breakfast (cooked on extremely compact little stoves), shivered through packing up our dew-covered tents, and shivered through our final packing until the sun hit our clearing - at which point we rapidly began shedding layers and the bugs took a hike. (Ha. Good riddance).
We pumped lake water (it fed the streams and waterfalls down the path, so it wasn’t stagnant) through our clever, clever little filters and filled our water bottles. My pack (which I totally could have managed) turned out to be 40-something pounds, which my dad said was unacceptable. So I gave the tent poles to Hilary and the extra Nalgene to my dad and what with one thing and another we got it down to 35 or so. Lewis, who rather overestimated how much food he was going to need, weighed in at 55 lbs. My dad was at 45-ish, and Hilary was maybe 25.
We took some group pictures, and off we went. Peter spent the first mile or so carrying the viola in his arms before Dave took pity and helped him rig a carrying strap across his pack. It was an easy hike - 6.7 miles from Mowich Lake to Cataract Valley Camp.
We took it easy, arrived an hour or so before nightfall, set up camp, ate…the camp had a stream, a “throne” toilet (two, in fact, back to back for, one assumes, relative privacy so long as everyone is courteous and does not turn around) with an excellent view of a rockslide down a hill. You could sit on the throne, look up at all the tumbled rocks, and contemplate how very flat you’d be if they decided to start moving again.
Bear count: 0
Chipmunks: not many
Bugs: annoying
And that was Day 1.
Day 2 was a slightly longer 7 miles to Mystic Lake Camp. 1600 feet of down, 2600 of up, and nearly a thousand feet of that was over a stretch of about half a mile. It was a 43.6% grade, according to Crazy Dave’s detailed notes, and it was brutal.
We got a late start that day. We planned to leave by 9:00, and by 9:00 Dave and Bob set out. The rest of us scrambled and left in two’s and three’s and by the time I’d had a cup of the Chai Lewis brought, brushed my teeth, visited the Throne (and gotten lost coming back) nearly everyone had left. By 9:30 it was just me and Peter, who was struggling with his voila-carrying-strap. I stayed to help out (and mock, of course), so we didn’t get on the road until 9:45 and the end result was that when we caught up with the others, they had all been sitting around on a log by a stream at the trail junction waiting for us for 40 minutes. I left to go find a Throne somewhere, and by the time I got back everyone (including Peter) was yakking about what a terrible slowpoke I was.
Me: Peter! You’re participating in this?
Peter: What?
The next section (past the shaky cable bridge where it was strongly advised that we cross one at a time, and where jumping, bouncing and swaying were strictly prohibited) was the brutal uphill, and Peter and I set out ahead of the rest of the group. (I was proving I wasn’t a slowpoke.)
I set the pace to “grueling”, which is what I always did in Oregon Trail, and which I now kind of regret because it seems very cruel in retrospect. We’d been at the meet-up point for maybe fifteen minutes when Lewis and Bob showed up.
Lewis: Been here long?
Me: Oh, ages.
Peter: Not long.
Lewis:…So about fifteen minutes, then.
Me:…Ages and ages.
There was resting, there was gorp, and lunch (made of powerbars and water and my mom’s home-made jerky which was delicious.)
There was a beautiful meadow, some tramping through rocks and snow, and a (cold, buggy) campsite by an excellent lake. Bob twisted his ankle on the trail, which was very unfortunate, but gave me the opportunity to dig out the ace-bandage in my first-aid kit.
We had two campsites and ate together in an abandoned third campsite (to throw off the bears). Peter plunked away at his viola and our neighboring campers came by to demand a concert.
We hung our bear-bags and I forgot to take the haw-candy I’d brought from China out of my pockets, and spent the night imagining that every rustle was a bear, scenting out food and coming to rip my tent (which I was sharing with Hilary - who didn’t know I had candy in my pocket) open and eat us.
Bear count: 0
Chipmunks: none to mention
Bugs: Still v. annoying
Day 3 we had to go 9.2 miles to Sunrise, where Bill “the old turtle” Crone and his wife Nurse Pam, and Normal Dave (as distinguished from Crazy Dave the last time we went hiking) and Bronka (another hiking companion) were meeting us with Real Non-Dehydrated Food. Namely, steaks.
The Family Unit left early because The Mother wanted an early start. Ate cold breakfast of fruit- pro-bars to save on dishes and I was snippy because I wanted a hot breakfast. We went down through the forest and the trees got less and less green until there was a thin trim of dead trees opening onto a vast wasteland resulting from a landslide in 1989. There were lovely, healthy trees on the far side of the wasteland, and it turned out that that a fair amount of the rockslide was covering up the Winthrop Glacier - we kept pausing to see if we could catch the small rockslides that kept breaking away off the top of the glacier. (If you haven’t seen one up close, they’re incredible. A literal mountain of solid ice. You look and you think, “Oh, what a nice, dusty hill!” and then you think, “that’s not a rather large hill, that’s a frickin’ gigantic ice cube!”)
We ate our reconstituted oatmeal at lunch, which made me more cheerful. Peter tried to cross a stream without using the bridge and was only moderately successful (his shoes and the poor rented-viola-case got the worst of it). More meadows (incredibly distracting for my mother, who kept stopping to take pictures). At the top of a ridge there was an opportunity to detour and climb Skyscraper Mountain, full of loose shale and goat-tracks. Bob and my mom continued on ahead, Dave, my dad, Hilary, Peter and I set out to climb, Lewis guarded our packs from chipmucks and avaricious fellow-hikers. (Peter doubled back early on because he’d forgotten his frisby.)
Me: You slacker! Are you quitting?
Peter: Yep.
Later….
Me: You wanted your Frisby.
Peter: I’m gonna throw it off the mountain.
Me: …Yup.
At the top, Peter’s frisby landed just this side of the cliff-edge, I took panoramic photos, and my dad called from where he was already halfway down the mountain for me to hurry up. When we were halfway down the mountain to the relatively flat plain below, Peter’s frisby did a swan-dive into oblivion - Peter had somewhat misjudged the effect of the wind and kept craning his neck to look for the lost frisby. I said “I told you so” a lot.
A mile from Sunrise we caught up with Bob and The Mother, resting at the crossroads. Peter and Crazy Dave had gone ahead to make sure no one swiped our campsites as Dinner and Camp were about a mile apart from each other. Bob was sitting by the road, reading the book he brought as his Personal Item, The Mother was chillin’ on a rock, with a chipmunk friend perched right behind her. Hilary spotted the chipmunk and said, “how long has he been there?” or “wow, making friends, aren’t you?” or something, and The Mother was exceedingly confused until she realized that the chipmunk had been sneaking steadily closer to her pack and food supplies for quite awhile and had practically climbed into her lap. After that we were on constant chipmunk alert as we waited for the stragglers - they kept trying to climb into our packs, and they were speedy. Also, very bold.
We staggered into Sunrise early, at 4:30, and were met by Bill and Pam and Normal Dave and Bronka - who told Crazy Dave that he needed to head home to Ruth. Ruth had planned to take this trip with us, but caring for a sick friend at the hospital left her with a severe case of strep. It had been bad enough to prevent her coming on the trip when we left, but had gotten much worse in our absence, requiring hospital visits and antibiotics. She’d been well taken care of by friends, but it was a blow for all of us - especially Dave and Ruth. The end result was that we switched out Crazy Dave for Normal Dave, who appropriated Crazy Dave’s tent and med kit (which had been left at the camp site) for the duration.
(Crazy Dave: Watch out, she’ll name you!
Normal Dave: Am I still “normal”?
Me: Well. Yes? I’m sorry, I guess “normal” is a little boring. Would you like me to come up with something else?
Normal Dave: No no! I’ll stick with “normal”.
Actually though, the others call him David, so we’ll stick with that. )
The Mother and I ran into a woman from Texas who wanted to know if we’d “hiked up that mountain”.
Me: Well, not up it, exactly. There are a lot of ups and downs, but it’s mostly around.
Her: Well goodness gracious me, how far have y’all come?
Me: Well, about ten miles today, but we’re doing the whole trail.
“The whole trail?” She said faintly, “How far is that?”
Me: About 93 miles.
Her: And how long does that take you?
Me: We’re in two groups - one is doing it in 15 days, the other in 11.
Her: Oh my stars, aren’t you afraid of the bears?
Me: Oh, no. They’re much more afraid of us than we are of them. We just hoist all our food up bear poles at night and keep our whistles handy - if you make enough noise they get scared and go away. Hopefully. Actually, we’re kind of disappointed we haven’t seen any so far.
Her: Oh, my. Well, I just have to take a picture of y’all, I think you’re amazing.
Me: A fan photo in America? YAY!
And then there was Food.
We’d only been on the trail for three days, but it was amazingly good to have real cooked food, where by Real Food I mean chips and dip, a fruit platter, a veggie plate, steaks cooked to order, beer, wine, apple pie and Bronka’s potato salad. I ate all of it.
I also got to meet Bill “the old turtle”, his wife Pam, and Bronka for the first time. The Old Turtle is an avid hiker and mountaineer whom my dad met through hiking. He is apparently warm in every wind and weather, and two separate people that evening told me about his penchant for hiking through snowfields in shorts and emerging with ice sickles hanging from his leg-hair. His wife Pam is a nurse, and we peppered her with questions about our various aches, pains, blisters and sprains.
Bronka Sundstrom. She’s 85 and 4’11, bird-bones and tough-as-nails. I’ve been hearing about her for years and hadn’t met her until this trip. She’s been kind of a hero from afar. Hilary and I asked her what her nationality was and she said her husband was Swedish, but she was Jewish, “all the way back to Abraham.” She wears a gold star-of-David, was born in Poland, lost her entire family to the Holocaust. I heard she was 50 pounds when she was carried unconscious out of Auschwitz; she met her husband Ake in Sweden as she was recovering and re-learning how to walk. I asked when she had come to America and she told me that at the advent of the Cold War she knew she couldn’t survive another war, and came here. At 77 years old she became the oldest woman to summit Mt. Rainier. She would have been the oldest person to summit, in a climb last summer, but she had to cancel to look after her husband, who was sick at the time and has since passed away. She’s talking about making the climb again next summer.
She’s a legend at Mt. Rainier. Everyone knows her, and everyone who knows her loves her. She remembers everything, and just as I’d been hearing lots about her, she’d been hearing lots about me. When I met her she said, “You’re Erica.” And I said, “You’re Bronka. I’ve heard so much about you!”
Bronka: And I’ve heard so much about you! It’s like we already know each other second hand!
Hilary told me later that, discussing the side-trip up skyscraper mountain, someone asked who had climbed the peak. Crazy Dave had, of course, and surely Eric went, and probably Hilary too. What about Erica? And Bronka apparently cut in to say, “Oh no no no, Erica didn’t climb that extra mountain! She just got back from China, she’s much too tired to be climbing mountains!”
I was tickled pink - Bronka is apparently well enough informed of my antics and whereabouts to talk about me like a grandchild.
At the end of our meal, with dusk approaching, we all prepared to collect the new cache of food our friends had brought us, dump our trash in the trashcans (Yay! Trashcans!) and waddle off down the trail to our campsite. Bronka hugged me and kissed my cheek and said, “I’m glad I finally got to meet you. You have a very special family.”
“I know,” I said fervently, “they’re awesome.”
“I’m glad you know,” She told me, and we started off.
So that’s Bronka. I love, love, love her story. Most people would have been squished like bugs and here she is, maybe 80 pounds soaking wet and she has grandchildren and an army of fantastically loyal friends and she climbs mountains in her spare time. And she does it in half the time younger climbers do. She remembers people, and she pays attention to other people’s stories, and she makes everyone around her feel special and loved and she’s amazing.
Hilary and I carried a bear-bag full of food a mile to the campsite. We set up in the almost-dark and Hilary discovered that her Platypus water-bottle had leaked all over her pack. I learned that, when hoisting bear-bags up the bear-poles you’re supposed to not let the bag touch the central pole - this is to prevent rodents from climbing up and eating your food.
Actual outhouse here, but no running water. On the upside, no dishes. And I only had to tell Hilary a couple of times that counting calories while hiking ten miles a day with 30 lb packs was beside the point.
Bear Count: 0
Chipmunks: Several. V. Persistent.
Bugs: Minimal, and they all seemed to go for Peter. (as long as they stay away from me, man.)
Day 4 through 11 forthcoming. I’ve got, like orientation stuff to do tomorrow.
Take care everyone, and patience - I’m catching up on correspondence slowly. You don’t want to know what my inbox looks like.