Sunday, July 31, 2011

a diabolical evil

now that we're mostly out of the snow, and into the land of vibrant greenery, that diabolical scourge poison oak has returned... not only does this stuff grow in a choker pattern around the trail - leaning in like it wants to touch you; it also grows in proximity to several plants which seem to mimic it, or it them... this results in me doing a crazy frenetic ninja dance, which surprisingly involves less finesse than you might imagine...



just to remind you: you touch this plant; brush past it; your pack gently knocks a leaf; and the oil is on you. once on you, you unwittingly spread it everywhere. if it's on your hands, you rub your eyes, scratch your arm etc; you're constantly spreading it without knowing. it takes a couple of days for the symptoms to start showing, and then it can be blisters and itchiness galore - for 2 jolly weeks...




so i tell myself: 'don't touch your face, don't touch your face' because i keep forgetting and touching my poles where they've probably touched the plant, and then a mosquito lands on my face... it's like a crazy conspiracy (actually, while i was being demented in my efforts to avoid this stuff, i did start wondering if the us military had engineered this stuff to stop land invasions - every thing else crazy over here seems to have been created by the military...)

what's worse than the poison oak-mosquito combo, is the fact that it often grows in amongst the thimbleberries. thimbleberries are extremely tasty berries, a little like a raspberry, and they lure you towards them, only to reveal last second that they are choked thickly with poison oak...

[in those shots above, the cool big star-like leaves are thimbleberries, the other leaves are poison oak. in the second shot you can see a couple of thimbleberries on a plant...]

g'day from chester...

dad mentioned that i don't make it very clear where i am. i'm in chester dad - mile 1335 roughly... i'm at some great trail angels' house. meredith picked headbanger, me and team canada up from the trail head, dropped the canadians at a motel, and brought headbanger and i home. we had chicken parmigiana with polenta, salad and beans for tea, with lemonade cake and ice cream for desert, and wine and coffee... it's a very beautiful house, and i'm cowboying in the backyard, hoping to see a coyote (one apparently visited last night)....

a couple of nights ago we ate dinner in a resort place the trail runs through... i use the term resort loosely.



this first shot is headbanger's burger. i got a better shot which portrays its dimensions more accurately, but doesn't show anything else...



















the second is chris and nicole, and some of their dinner...












the third is headbanger's valiant effort eating his hamburger. it took considerable effort.



this is completely irrelevant, but recently i was camping alone, and it was early morning and i was lying in bed eating my muesli which mum & dad brought from australia because they seriously have nothing like it here. and i was very dopey because i was on every migraine drug i had, and i was staring at the huge pine or fir in front of me when a humming bird came zipping through. they are so amazing: ridiculously tiny; they remain stationary in the air, and then zip to another space, where they will briefly remain. it was so fast and i was so dopey that i can't quite remember what it looked like, but it seemed to have a fabulously metallic green and blue sheen, and appeared to move backwards as well as forwards through the air...

a swim in a river...

we've finally hit weather that's good for swimming, and rivers that don't have ice floating in them... there haven't been too many swimming possibilities yet, but i'm hoping there's more soon...




the first shot is looking downstream from the bridge... looked like a great river for floating down if you had the time, although there are some pretty gnarly bits...





if you check out that little 'beach' area on the right hand side of the second picture, near where a creek's entering the river; that's where we had lunch and dunked ourselves in the water... felt so good...









this was a fork of the feather river, and there was a cool, high footbridge over it...






this is our lunch spot - with happy whale, head banger, nicole & chris...







the cool, high bridge was perfect for throwing stuff off, which apparently these guys do a lot...

some trailside flowers...

i'm having a lot of camera issues, think my lens is broken: it won't focus when i zoom.





every so often there will be a pocket of these flowers. they have fabulous freckled faces, and there was a butterfly flitting amongst these ones...






these are some kind of buttercup (maybe?) that grows near the water. although it's hard to tell what's normally a wet area, and what's simply flooded with snow melt... on this day i had to walk a long way to find dry land to dig a jimbrick hole, and my first two excavations filled with water as fast as i dug...





not at all sure this third one's a native. i saw trees with these flowers in yosemite valley near the visitors centre, and then again a couple of days ago along the trail. they look like they should be in a south american rain forest...





more of those freckly ones...




this 5th one also looks like it might not be a native - but that might be cos we grow it in gardens in australia. today i walked through miles and miles of azalea bushes, which i assume are indigenous. it's funny how many californian plants you'd see in a nursery in australia...


wohoo - 2134 km... halfway there...


so there's a little debate about exactly where halfway is - i figure it's symbolic anyway, and largely notional considering we're 60% of the way through our time, and apparently through the hard stuff; and we've spent a lot of time wandering off trail with the snow, and taking detours... but this is the halfway point as determined by an on-trail marker...


this series of photos involves chewi, lighthouse, headbanger and i doing the celebratory leap, only it takes broken record a while to figure out the camera...

i like it as a series, feel like it tells a bit of a story... (maybe like what a bunch of demented uncos we are...)[in order it's chewy/chewie/chewi - short for chewbacca, me, headbanger & lighthouse]











the last shot is lunch right on the trail at the halfway point... chewy, lighthouse, broken record, head banger, seahorse and chilidog... chewy, lighthouse & broken record are canucks - from edmonton, alberta...

Thursday, July 28, 2011

a very brief g'day

hey, i'm at these fabulous trail angels' holiday house at buck's lake, sort of near belden. it's 11:27pm, and i need to get to sleep so i'll be very brief. next time i get on i'll write of the amazing perils i've been facing, and the frenetic ninja dance i've had to develop to stay alive. i've hiked the last couple of days with chris & nicole & happy whale & head banger, and the section before that alone.

today more than any other day actually felt like summer (and we had a 3000 foot climb after which we were all drenched in sweat). we got to swim in a river with no chunks of ice floating in it... i'll be in chester in 2 days and hopefully i'll get a chance to write more then, although i'm hoping to be in and out quickly...

Monday, July 25, 2011

annie...


so, i'm not walking with annie any more, but we walked almost 1000 miles together, so i wanted to tell you a little about her... the important stuff...

she smells like pina colada (well actually, not since she posted her maui mike sunscreen which was destroying her skin, but mate, she did smell deliciously like pina colada - i'm surprised bears weren't charging out of the scrub to lick her), likes long walks in the snow (actually, she's a little ambivalent about walking in the snow, in fact, last i heard she was completely over it... but she did spend a lot of time walking through the snow...)

um, she (this is serious), likes to get saltines (the crackers), crush them all up (she says smooshes - i think that's the technical term), then squirt milk into them out of a water bottle, make patterns and then eat it...

and, (now don't judge her), her favourite movie is armageddon... she can give you a synopsis longer than the actual film, which i realise is no longer a synopsis...

she is an amazing tracker. actually i think she's got a shoe fetish. one morning while we were hiking she suddenly stopped and stabbed the snow, saying: 'merrels! who's wearing merrels? no one ahead of us has merrels! chilli and pounder are wearing salomons, happy meal and waldo have cascadias, so do gangsta rap and timex. no merrels'... and sure enough, we shortly caught up with topsy turvy and data muffin, who we hadn't walked behind previously, and data muffin was wearing merrels... she honestly can go through everyone we've anywhere near and tell you their footwear, to the degree that she can tell you i have men's salomons because the almost identical tread has squares rather than 'L' shapes...

when i find it, i'll upload a photo of annie doing a john muir impersonation... uncanny likeness... while we were in the high sierras there were often etchings of john muir, who seemed to be about to stuff his fist into his mouth, as if he'd been starving for a very long time, (either that or he was pondering all the wise things he was going to say about the beauty surrounding him)... anyway, there were a few times i though he was right there with us...

some random shots - from a wee while back...



this is the view one direction from the ridge i lost my bed off...












and this is happy meal taking a photo of a lake...






this is the 1000 mile mark... in case you can't tell we're making the 1000... i know annie looks like she's being a rocket, but she's the '1'... [annie, me, alex, 12 oz]





and this is an almost unposed cooking shot... note the bear cans (we don't need them any more)... it's probably not quite thongs weather, but i've just been to get water and have my duds tucked into my thermals...







this is my pack after i woke one morning - alex's sleeping bag was thickly coated with ice - better insulated than 12oz' or mine i'd say - mine had chunks of ice but a lot of water...



and this is alex (who really should be called blue steel, but his trail name is stagg), modelling some glasses he found in the bush...

the red moose inn, sierra city



tonight i'll be sleeping in the backyard of the red moose inn, sierra city. these guys let us shower and do our washing for free, and use their place like it's home... (the photos are pretty terrible - into the sun, but if you look closely they offer old english style fish & chips - although not tonight - tonight for us it was ribs, roast potatoes, carrots and baked beans...)






i'm pretty close to the 2000km mark, and getting closer to halfway... hopefully the next few hundred will go faster than the last few (not that i want it to go by quickly, but i'm behind schedule for meeting jane)... it's crazy to think i'm still shy of halfway, but still a long way off hitting oregon - california is more than 60% of the trail...






seems like every second house has an american flag, they're everywhere. in fact i was walking through the bush a week or so ago and there was an american flag flapping away on the top of an inauspiscious mountaintop...



this is the view from the backyard - straight down at the bend of a huge river...

g'day from downtown sierra city...

i just uploaded these photos and a head appeared around the doorway to say 'ribs are up', so i might go partake and see if i can get back on here in a bit...




ribs were good, but i'm too full...

there's been more and more clear sections of trail... you can just see the trail coming down this hill. i loved the snow, but it's hard to make miles when you're climbing speed bumps of snow or losing the trail again as it disappears into the white... it's very tiring too.




lots of the ridgelines i've been following have been these fabulous volcanic extrusions, rugged and craggy and improbably shaped...




tragically my lens has some kind of weird spot in it, so the sky always has this dark mark... i'm constantly amazed by the flowers, sometimes i'm wading knee deep in flowers.




there have been so many lakes in this last section. initially they were snowbound but mostly thawed (unlike those of the high sierra), but the snow is disappearing, and today i had my first practically snow free day...

Thursday, July 21, 2011

an address

We're about to head into desolation wilderness - good name hey - I was asked for a postal address:

Hold for PCT Hiker Kylie Skidmore
General Delivery
BELDEN CA 95915

I'll try to put more on in sierra city if i get access.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

still in tahoe

well, we haven't quite left south lake tahoe - it is an intriguing place, and my amazing efficiency has shone through once again, meaning by the time i got onto the trail this arvo it would have been quite late, so we've decided to stay another night... i've got 30 minutes in the library, but i think their internet is still struggling...



i really haven't captured the wildflowers well, but these are donkey's ears - out everywhere...






and the equally beautiful ma & pa skidmore... (squinting in the bright light...)


for the first time in a while i don't have a sunburnt tongue... i've heard of people getting sunburnt tongues before and thought it funny, but it's actually easy to do, and if you drink wine it's no good...

hmmm, my 30 minutes is up and the computer is totally struggling, hopefully in sierra city i have more success...

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

i'm sitting in the dentist's chair in south lake tahoe with my mouth full of analgesic... the dentist is optimistic he can save the tooth. i fractured it while eating gorgonzola crackers with ma & pa in a great campground at sonora bridge, and over the next few days slowly shards of tooth fell out of my mouth and then the magic steel band fell off.

[fortunately the dentist - and marvellous assistant marisa worked their mad skills and i now have a functioning plastic replacement tooth - yeehah]...

ma & pa walked in from sonora pass with me, until over 10 000 feet, and then 4 days later walked in and met me on the last few miles of trail heading into echo lake and we walked out together. in this last stretch i saw a bear - i was beginning to doubt their existence. it was huge: cinnamon brown, fluffy and quite cuddly looking... also sadly camera shy. ma & pa saw one too in yosemite...

one night during the section i just walked from sonora pass happy meal and i camped on a ledge with the most magnificent view. the wind built up and was gusting in bullets, hitting the trees above us in warning before buffeting us. during the night i got up to pee and was looking out over this amazing lake, snow capped mountains and forest in the moonlight when i suddenly saw my inflatable sleeping mat and quilt flying high overhead, down toward the snowy valley below.

happily the wind meant my shoes weren't frozen, so i shoved my bare feet into them and went for a nocturnal, moonlit stroll to recover my un-punctured (yay) bed. it was pretty funny (potentially disastrous, although only 17 miles out of town, so if it had not ended well it would have been expensive rather than dangerous)...

there have been times during the last week of walking where i have seriously laughed out loud at how preposterously beautiful it has been. sadly the internet in tahoe library is down, and so i can't upload any photos (not that they do it any justice) and i'm in a fabulous cafe called the keys which has great smoothies, but don't think i can upload... anyway, the wildflowers have been insanely, riotously, prolific, and everything is so green and alive (terrible spring words like vernal and fecund keep coming to mind - i don't how to explain how vital and vibrant it all looks - the sunlight seems to glow through the flowers and foliage)... sometimes it all looks so quintessentially north american - with huge volcanic mountains with partial snow, and endless pines, firs and spruces, and green meadows where you expect to see a bear...

the snow has slowed me down a great deal, and i'm about a week and a half behind where i intended to be at this stage, however i feel like in the next few sections i might be able to catch up a little time, although the doomsayers keep telling us it's all snow - snow all the way to canada... well, ma & pa have finished their castaway smoothie (mango, coconut and something else tasty), and we're heading over to the cork & more (best coffee i've had in north america - which is a very easy contest at this stage, but this stuff was actually genuinely good - and great salads too - by any measure)... this is a tough existence...

thanks heaps for your comments and emails - so so appreciated... i'll be in sierra city in maybe 5 days (think sierra city has a population of maybe 200, crazy metropolis)...

Thursday, July 14, 2011

yosemite moments...

yosemite valley is amazing - you can understand why so many people visit... everywhere you look there are spectacular sights (i'm getting the flashing 5 minute warning sign...)







these are the trees above my head when i awoke in the valley - with the sounds of a river gurgling away nearby...







we wandered into the hotel ahwanee one night - dirty stinking hikers in this fabulously opulent hotel...


i saw my first raccoons in yosemite - i was excited despite the fact my friends warned me they scratch and bite and can carry rabies....


one minute and i still haven't mentioned the amazingly friendly locals, or the trail angels, or half the things i was going to write about... one day...

falls

there's a crazy amount of water coming down the falls for this time of the year - it's that narnian snow melt. we finished off our john muir trail detour on the mist trail, we got saturated and my lens was covered in moisture...








on half dome

these were taken on top of half dome... there's all sorts of rock cairns and patterns on top, and junkfood-fat marmots and squirrels...










while we were up there these fantastic thunderheads were building, really spectacular, and there was thunder for a while to the north, then to the south, but never particularly close to us...













down the bottom is annie coming down, hard to get a perspective on how steep the cables are - i just slid down really, if there weren't so many people you could go quite fast.