Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Wet Down

Wonderland Trail
Ipsut Creek Camp to Mystic Lake
9-7-2010

I stayed late at Ipsut Camp this morning, waiting to see if the rain that had increased over the night would let up for the day's climb. It was a solid four thousand to Mystic Camp, but more importantly, I'd be staying at that elevation, and Mystic Camp is surrounded on three sides with glaciers. I didn't want to be wet there. I met a nice couple at Ipsut who were also heading up to Mystic that day. Also, I was delaying because the bathroom at Ipsut was so gloriously warm and dry. I wish I could say it was the first time I considered sleeping in a bathroom. It wasn't the first time and it certainly wasn't the last. It was a nice bathroom. The rain steadily increased throughout the day.

Ipsut was simultaneously homey and spooky. Picnic tables, car parking areas, blank informational boards telling you about nothing at all. I heard trail crews working in the hillsides and realized that Rainier NP is a backpacker's park. The floods had nibbled away at the auto access, but the park service was in absolutely no great hurry to restore the car camp services. Contrast this with the reconstruction of the WT after those same floods. More than seventy percent of the WT was utterly destroyed. Looking at the glacial basins it's not hard to see why; it looks like a unidirectional Nagasaki. The WT, though, was ready for business in a couple of month's time. Not so Ipsut Camp.

This sounds bitter, but it's really not. I understand what the NPS is doing. Backpackers just don't cause the same sort of mass obnoxiousness as Bubba McLubbitz from Pabstown, with his feeding the wildlife and chucking empties at marmots. It's just that my grandparents raised my parents car camping, and my parents raised me car camping, until some weird combination of brain chemistry and circumstance led me to this. If I had spawn at the normal time in the human life cycle I probably would have reverted to car camping as well and given my pack to some college student. The car camp, though, is the gateway. It's how this starts, this, the greatest thing in the world. It's a window into the freedom every kid fawns at when his parents irritate him. If only I could get out of this car and into those hills! They'd never find me there! When you get older you realize what a double-edged statement that is. Without car campgrounds, though, the opportunity for that type of growth may never occur.

So I had to leave my cozy bathroom sometime. Rain and wind. Four thousand feet. I broke one of my taboos and plugged in my mp3 player until it shorted out. It got me past four thousand feet. Carbon glacier is just barely visible in this mist and rain, an enormous gray-white back, like a nightmare Moby Dick. I climb past it. Is this mist or steam from my body. Steam, rain, both. Clearing Moraine Park I am beginning to not feel very well. I throw up a protein bar I ate at Carbon River bridge. Super Chocolate Chunk. I don't stop. It is only the mid forties, but the wet and the wind make this feel far worse than the eleven degrees I hiked through in the Carters that September four years ago. There are flowers up here that are like four foot wands with pom poms on the ends. The pom poms are wilted in the rain and the whole plant looks rather ridiculous, like a plant version of the marmot. Perhaps ridiculousness is a survival strategy up here.

I come to Mystic Camp. It's deserted. All the people who made reservations have cancelled them. I hang the food bag and throw up the tent in the rain. More of my stuff is wetter than I'd like. It's very bad. I try and get warm inside a damp down bag. It's lost all of its insulating power and is holding a range of joules somewhere between jack and squat. I give up trying to keep anything dry and put on the polypro on my wet skin, then rain gear, all socks, gloves, sleeping bag. Tent's turning into a sauna from my body. I went up too fast, it's three PM. I fall asleep for three hours and wake up roasty toasty. Burning. I make my way out of the tent and to my hanging food bag. Somehow I manage to eat a Super Chocolate Chunk. Not sure how I could do that after tossing one up earlier but that's the hunger for you. Then a bagel. Then a wedge of cheese, some nuts. Jerky. Did I eat another bagel? I don't know. Everything is delicious. I'm feeling pretty good. Actually I feel fantastic, like I just did shots of some exotic vodka made from nougat and angel tears. I go back to my sodden tent and wet bag and fall asleep again, rain knocking condensation off the inside of the tent onto my face. I stuff my head in the hood of the rain jacket and snore very loudly.

Late, late that night, after eight, the couple comes in. I talk to them in the morning. They are getting out at Sunrise, my next camp and last food cache. They're done with wet and cold. They invite me with them- they can get me as far as Steve's Canyon. I'd have to hitch from there, but I tentatively agree. The bag is wet. It's a down bag. A wet down bag is worse than nothing, at best it's uncomfortable, but it can be (and has been) a death sentence. I wasn't coming down from the heights until this thing was almost through, after Summerland, two nights away, and I was not going to spend another night above five thousand with a wet down bag.

1 comment:

Yurubutu Gralb said...

hope you can make it all the way