Back On Track
Jillian left the cabin about 15 minutes before me, and we discussed our route plans for the day. Still riding the high of being alive and safe, I decided I would try the primary-route bushwhack. I was also feeling a lot more confident in my bushwhacking skills (looking back now I recognize that this is insane and illogical, since I had made possibly one of the dumbest routefinding errors in the history of the PNT just the previous day). Jillian wasn’t feeling in the mood for a long bushwhack, so she settled on the alternate route.
I said goodbye to Snow Peak Cabin for (hopefully) the last time. My morning hike to the bushwhack drop-off point was an absolute breeze. Second time’s a charm.
The primary-route bushwhack ended up being an absolute blast, especially compared to the psychological hell I had experienced the previous day. My first goal was to find the south shoulder of Edds Mountain, which would dip into a ravine and back onto a small north-south ridge.
Finding the shoulder was fairly easy – the brush wasn’t too thick, and I had high visibility. Following it was a challenge, though. The forested shoulder of the mountain was covered in little boulder cliffs, and I had to change my route every few minutes to work around a treacherous descent.
When I made it to the bottom of the ravine (west of the yellow caution symbol on the first map), I had to sit for a few minutes to plan my next move. My options were to climb directly south up a steep rock pile onto the ridge, or somehow squeeze through an impossibly-thick patch of young pines to the west, and round up the side of the ridge more gradually.
My legs were still tingling a bit from yesterday’s nettle incident, and the prospect of getting stabbed thousands of times with pine needles wasn’t very enticing. But I decided it wasn’t a good time to risk a difficult rock scramble, and braced for the discomfort as I squeezed into the pine regrowth.
Once I was up on the ridge, it was easy going. Previous hikers had marked the way with cairns, and the undergrowth was very manageable. I came off the ridge and veered a bit too far north, bumbling around for a bit on the hillside before I pulled out my map again to get my bearings. From a high vantage point, I saw what I was looking for: A clearing in the forest with a marshy lake, about a quarter mile ahead and down another steep ravine. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out the best way to climb down the pile of boulders in front of me, then steadily worked my way down.
The wetland was totally silent. I stopped for a minute to appreciate the feeling the long wetland grasses rippling gently in the breeze. The toughest part of the bushwhack was over… I followed the wooded eastern edge of the marsh and cut southwest over a small hill to find Forest Road 600 (0471P)
I sat down for lunch next to a patch of huckleberry bushes, and had a lunch of Peanut Butter And Huckleberries On A Tortilla to celebrate a successful bushwhack. Jillian came walking up a few minutes later, and we exchaned bushwhack stories. She had actually changed her mind and started bushwhacking on the primary route, but then changed her mind a second time to cut over to the alternate route once she hit the first ravine.
After a couple miles of roadwalking, the rest of the day was a beautiful hike on the Thirteen Mile Trail through a shady huckleberry-filled forest, over dry grassland, and into the San Poil Canyon.
I camped at the trailhead for the Thirteen Mile Trail. A bunch of small things put me in a bad mood that night: I was exhausted since I didn’t get enough sleep the previous night. The flimsy carabiner clip on my CNOC water bladder snapped, so I could no longer gravity-filter water, and it had a small leak in one corner, so squeeze-filtering was a pain. The ground all around the trailhead was gravel hardpack, and I had a hard time setting up my tent. Also, a few hours after I finally got to sleep, some guy in a big truck pulled up into the parking lot and started shining a flashlight directly at my tent. I yelled to him, “Can I help you? Are you OK?” Then he said, “Sorry”, and got in his truck and drove off, which left me feeling freaked out.