It’s
never fun packing up a wet tent while standing in the mud as rain continues to
drizzle, but it is what it is and complaining wouldn’t make the task any easier. Breakfast
is only a snack this morning and then I was back on the trail at 8:00 a.m. –
extremely late. As I walked, I keep my eyes peeled, hoping to spot
where Frank and Brownie might have camped, but I never do locate their campsites. Where
the trail crossed a scree slope, the rain from last night’s storm had done
significant damage to the trail, washing it down the mountain, and leaving many
small gullies behind.
My goal
for the day was a shelter called the Urich cabin located at mile 2,355 in Government
Meadow, and it took me until 7:00 p.m. to reach this location; that was eleven
hours of hiking to only go fifteen miles. It continued to rain on and off
throughout the day, so I never had a chance to take my rainsuit off. All
day, I was plagued with bouts of diarrhea, thanks to my Giardia host.
Once
having contracted Giardia, it takes about two weeks for the first symptoms to
make their appearance, and left untreated, it can stay with a person for a long
time. The only medication I had with me was Imodium, and it helped, but
didn’t solve the problem.
For this
foul weather, the Urich cabin was a lifesaver. There were fifteen hikers
already at the cabin and most had claimed a spot on the cabin floor or in the
loft above to lay out their sleeping bags. The cabin had a large wood
stove in the far end of the building and a toasty fire was blazing which
provided adequate warmth for the structure. Along the ceiling crossbeams
and sides of the interior of the cabin were nails and hooks on which to hang
articles of clothing, sleeping bags, tents, and ground cloths to dry out.
I found several nails close to the stove and hung my sleeping bag up to
dry. The cabin was full of mice, but nobody paid them any attention.
These little guys had to eat too.
Most of
the hikers at the cabin were no strangers to me. After twenty-three
hundred miles, I recognized most of them. Ranch and Biers were here; in
fact, they had been here for several days. Biers said he had been quite
ill, and trail angels Beaker and Dragon Fly, a hiking couple I hadn’t seen or
heard from since our meeting on Mount San Jacinto in Southern California, had
been taking care of him. I knew that Biers only had one kidney, but I was
not sure that this was the cause of his ailments.
My
Giardia was in full activation mode, so I chose to sleep outside on the porch
so as not to disturb anyone on my nightly runs to the outhouse. Giardia
waits for no man or woman.
The cabin
was built by the Sno-Jammers Snowmobile Club out of Puyallup, Washington, and
was constructed in the fashion of a log cabin. The entire structure was
assembled off-site, then disassembled and ferried by helicopter to the building
site, where it was again re-assembled. The cabin was named for Mike
Urich, a trail worker in this area during the 1940s and1950s, and attached to
the outside wall above the entrance door was a warning sign that said the wrath
of Mike would descend upon anyone who did harm to the trees.
In the
middle of the night, during one of my treks to the outhouse, the cloud cover
had disappeared and the nighttime sky was ablaze with twinkling stars, but by
morning, gray skies had reappeared, obliterating the sun that was rising in the
east. I was up early, gathering my equipment from inside the cabin, and
trying hard not to disturb anyone.
One by
one, the other hikers also began to rise, and several immediately began cooking
their morning breakfast. My breakfast consisted of a package of
Pop-Tarts, a small bag of nuts, and a little tub of peanut butter; that was enough
to get me going for the day. Of the fifteen hikers at the cabin, I was
the fourth to leave, but within a few hours the rest caught up and overtook me,
and then I had the whole trail to myself.
The Urich
cabin could be accessed by numerous logging roads that crisscrossed the
mountains in this section of the PCT. Indeed, as I pressed on up the
trail towards Green Pass and Blowout Mountain, I crossed many of these logging
roads, and from the high ridges that the trail kept to, I had a panoramic view
of vast tracts of forestlands that had been clear-cut by loggers, much more so
than seen in previous national forests.
And there
was a reason for this, and that reason was the Burlington Northern Railroad.
In 1880, the railroad was granted land subsidies amounting to every other
square-mile section of land as compensation for laying tracks across Stampede
Pass. Eventually, the timber interests of the Burlington Northern were spun off
as a separate company, known today as Plum Creek, the largest private landowner
in the continental U.S. Much of the timberlands that the PCT passed
through in this area had been logged and were awaiting reseeding.
The views
from the trail crests were stunning; Mount Rainier dominated the skyline, but
Mounts Adam and Saint Helen could also be seen in all their majesty and
glory. The storm of the last two days had moved out of the area, leaving
behind blue skies and warm sunny days. It was a great time to be on the
trail, and I was enjoying the hike, except for lingering bouts of Giardia.
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