Hiking Out

Hiking back out to the Pete Lake trailhead, and getting
a little work done along the way....

Our last night on the trail was bittersweet. The next day, we'd all be splitting up, heading to the four corners of the state. I decided to dress up our last night by wearing a tie, but nobody else felt it necessary to dress up. Have you ever walked into room with what looks like a bunch of homeless people while wearing a tie? Yep, that's what I did. =)

When I passed by Gary's tent, he waved me in closer.

"Do you know anything about that tree by the avalanche chute?"

"You mean that one that fell during the night?"

"Yeah, that one."

I rubbed my chin, trying to decide if I should fess up. "Yes, I might know something about that," I told him. =)

"I thought you might. We were a bit perplexed when we got down and it was already gone!"

This stream used to go down about 30
feet of trail, but I scratched out a path
to shorten that to about 10 feet. The 20
feet of trail past this point is still wet
where the water used to run, but it'll dry...

I didn't ask how he knew it was me--I assumed he figured it out from a process of elimination. There weren't many people who had the tools and opportunity to have done the work, but it made me smile to imagine them trying to figure out how the tree managed to cut itself out of the way. =) Gary thanked me for the unexpected help and I moseyed along.

Ken scouted the PCT to the south and found three more fallen trees on our side of a washed-out bridge, trees that one team would cut out in the morning before we quit for the day.

I set up my tarp due to threatening-looking clouds, but by the time I went to sleep, the skies had cleared so I unhooked one-half of it and folded it back along the other half. If it did start raining during the night, it would be relatively easy for me to reattached the loose side.

It didn't rain, though, and I enjoyed the stars during the night.

The next day, we took our time getting up. One team set off to clear the PCT of the fallen trees to the south while the rest of us fixed up the trail back to the trailhead for Pete Lake. Most of the work everyone did was cutting back the vegetation, but I carried the grub-hoe this time and worked on water drainage issues. Along the Pete Lake trail, there were some big problems with water not draining properly off the trail. Some of the issues were far too big for one person to fix quickly--our goal was to get back to the trailhead by 1:00 in the afternoon. And since I had the only grub-hoe in our group, I couldn't really expect much help. Handsaws and cross-cut saws generally aren't suitable tools for digging water drains.

Everyone, including the team that was originally behind us to cut out the three logs across the PCT, managed to pass me while I played in the mud. In one place, water ran about 30 feet down the length of the trail before it drained off into a meadow. There wasn't an easy or quick fix for this problem. The trail was so worn, it fell several inches below the surrounding terrain. With enough time and effort, I could have dug out a drainage where the water could cross the trail without running down it, but I didn't have enough time for that. So instead, I found a low point where the water could almost get off the trail and dug out that section. The water still drained down about 10 feet of the trail, but that's still a big improvement over the 30 feet of trail it had been running across.

For this project, I couldn't get the water off
the trail in the short time I had to work,
so I pushed the water to the right side of the
trail so people could walk on the dry
left side.

Another area had water running down about 15 feet of trail, but I couldn't see any quick or easy fixes for that. The trail was just worn down too deep. So I made a quick temporary fix, pushing up a lot of the rocks and debris on one side of the trail to the other side of the trail. This gave the water a channel on one side to flow down the trail and a dry area where hikers could travel on the other side. Not ideal, and it's certainly not a permanent solution, but at least it'll make things marginally better for anyone hiking the busy trail.

So I dug water drains, in mud and rocks, trying to do what I could to keep water off the trail. The Pete Lake Trail is in bad shape--a WTA work party could spend a week fixing up the water drainage issues along this short section of trail. As busy as it was, I felt that more turnpikes really needed to be installed. And the trail was busy--extremely busy now that it was a weekend. I passed dozens of people, three groups of people riding horses, half a dozen dogs, and--most unexpectedly--two goats. I'd never seen anyone take their goats out for a walk before, and they were so adorable! The goats were in training to carry loads, but they weren't carrying anything this year. This year was about teaching them how to hike on trails, cross streams, and get comfortable with their surroundings. The next year, the owners told us, they'd start carrying loads.

I finally reached one of the biggest pools of water sitting on the trail and at a cursory glance, I thought I could make a big improvement here. The pool of water looked like it was a good three or four inches deep in the middle and it spanned the entire width of the trail. A saw large frogs swimming in the water. A small berm  on one side seemed to hold the water in place preventing it from draining downwards off the trail, and I thought if I could just knock enough of that berm down, most of the water would drain right off the trail. The deepest part in the middle probably wouldn't, but I wasn't looking to fix the problem--just make it a little less bad. If I could drain it enough so people could walk along the side of the trail, it would be a huge improvement. As it was now, an entirely new path was forming cutting the turn in the trail off completely.

I went to work with the grub-ho, splashing mud and water all over myself, and started seeing the water draining of the trail into the marshy area. I was quite proud of this, and stood up on a log nearby which when I noticed that there was water draining into the trail from the other side of the log. The level of the water in the pool wasn't going on at all--I'd just created a current that hadn't been there before.

My public works project....
... that failed. =(

It wasn't a fast current, but the water was coming from a stream that ran into this log--a solid wall that the water couldn't go through, and so the water did what water does--it drained around the log. The berm had trapped the water from draining on the trail side, so it pooled up then went around the other side of the log. Now that I cleared out the berm, the water was slowly going around both sides of the log now. I needed to block the channel where water was getting into the trail--but I didn't have the time to fashion a solution. Drats. My biggest earth-moving project on the trip came to a screeching failure.

I cut my losses and continued the hike out to the trailhead. I hiked fast, no longer doing any trail work at all, trying to catch up with the rest of the group, asking people hiking in the opposite direction how far ahead of me they were located. I only managed to catch up with Gary before I reached the trailhead, but I was glad that I wasn't bringing up the rear and had everyone waiting on me.

I didn't have a ride scheduled to get me home from this point. My plan was to hitch a ride from anyone heading towards Seattle, and Joanna offered to give me a ride to the Bellevue Park and Ride. Perfect! Had nobody been heading towards Seattle, I did have a Plan B: I'd spend the next two days hiking south on the PCT to Snoqualimie Pass where Amanda would pick me up. =) As much as I'd have loved to hike to Snoqualmie Pass, I didn't really have time--I needed to get a lot done before I left town for nearly four months in just a few more days! But I had brought two days of extra food.... just in case.

So we all said our goodbyes and headed our separate ways. I hopped into Joanna's vehicle, and she drove me to Bellevue, where I picked up a bus that took me into downtown Seattle, where I transferred to another bus that took me home to West Seattle.

In related news, please help support WTA trips like this one by sponsoring me for WTA's annual Hike-a-Thon!

Public art at the bus stop in Bellevue.

Team Buzzsaw

Jeff carries a cross-cut saw across a log spanning a creek.

I left you hanging with me stranded at a trailhead with a bunch of strangers and Amanda driving off to Seattle. Technically, it was true, these were a bunch of strangers, but being part of a Washington Trails Association (WTA) work party, clearly they were good people.

Gary was leading this expedition, eleven of us in total. Our mission: To log out the Pacific Crest Trail from Lemah Meadows to Solo Tarn where we heard reports of countless trees blocking the trail. We were loggers.

Gary separated us into smaller groups--three groups of three and one group of two--and I was hooked up with the husband and wife team of Larry and Marcella. Each team would carry one cross-cut saw (kind of a requirement for logging, no two ways around that!), so Larry carried the saw. Marcella carried an axe. And I grabbed the grub-hoe and loppers. I worried about the loppers--I wanted to log out trails, I didn't want to be stuck cutting back vegetation, and really, that's all the loppers were good for. So I was a little hesitant about taking those at all, but Marcella seemed keen on bringing them along and since my pack was unusually light (I left most of my backpacking here four miles up the trail at Pete Lake), I volunteered to carry it.

I had the choice of a pulaski and a grub-ho for the other tool I would carry, and ultimately settled on the grub-ho because it was lighter. I kind of assumed that a pulaski would be more useful since it had an axe on one side, but that seemed redundant since Marcella already carried a dedicated axe. So I wound up carrying two tools that I felt better suited for building tread and cutting back vegetation than logging.

All of our tools were hand tools. We would be hiking into a wilderness area where gas-powered tools such as chainsaws are not permitted. Everything had to be done the old fashioned way, which frankly, is the way I like it best. Chainsaws are so loud, obnoxious, and noisy. A cross-cut saw might be slower, but I enjoyed it more.

We all carried Corona handsaws--perhaps the most useful tool for loggers other than the cross-cut saw itself.

This little fellow decided to visit me while
I was sitting in the sun waiting for the
rest of Team Buzzsaw to catch up. =)

It wasn't until a couple of days later that I got to thinking about our team--Larry, Marcella, and myself--and brought up the idea of a team name. Larry suggested Team Buzzsaw, and I immediately agreed. I think Marcella rolled her eyes at this point, which I took as her sign of "Okay, whatever." =) So we became Team Buzzsaw, but for the first couple of days, we had no name.

Gary asked me how the trail ahead was and if there were any logs blocking the Pete Lake Trail--our side trail to the PCT. I told him about one log crossing the trail, suspended about chest high stuck between several trees, just past Pete Lake. Beyond that, I didn't know the condition of the trail.

"Well, maybe we can do something about that tree."

Yes, maybe we could. We had cross-cut saws now. =)

With safety talks over, tools handed out, and teams assigned, we headed out.

The hike was non-eventful. We all hiked at our own pace, and I jumped ahead near the end to retrieve the gear I left at Pete Lake. I was stunned, however, to see that the tree blocking the trail I had described so vividly to the others had already been cut down! What the hell happened? It was there four hours earlier when I hiked out, and it was obvious that someone had come along and cut it out, but who? Where? The only people around was the camp of Boy Scouts on Pete Lake. Did they do that for a merit badge or something? At least they would have done something useful than take up large quantities of space in the backcountry, but I was a little disappointed that we couldn't cut it out ourselves.

I repacked my backpack with all my gear--all 42 pounds of it--and walked back to the tree where the rest of Team Buzzsaw was admiring the work.

"Is this the tree you were talking about?" they asked.

This would be Team Buzzsaw's first challenge.

"Yep, and I'm absolutely baffled at what happened. I swear, just four hours ago, this tree was BLOCKING the trail!"

We continued up the trail where, a short ways up, we caught up with two woman who were logging out another tree blocking the trail. The tree fairies! I knew they existed! They worked for the forest service or something and had been told that a pack string of horses needed to get up to Lemah Meadows so they were sent in to clear the trail for horses. A misunderstanding, to be sure, and they were doing all of the work we intended to do. Once that was all settled, though, they left the rest of the trees for us and they started working on other trail maintenance projects.

Team Buzzsaw did cut out two logs blocking the trail that afternoon on our way to Lemah Meadows, and the sheer number of logs blocking the short path between Pete Lake and Lemah Meadows was encouraging. Looks like we'd have plenty of work ahead. =)

The trees we cut out weren't particularly noteworthy. The rested on largely flat ground, they weren't especially large, nor posed any technical difficulties. Just a couple of average, run-of-the-mill fallen trees for Team Buzzsaw to get its hands dirty and get used to working together. =)

In related news, if you want to help fund this kind of important trail work, please consider sponsoring Amanda and myself in the WTA's annual Hike-a-Thon! These tools aren't free, and it helps enormously to keep our hiking trails open for business--especially as state and federal governments get stingier about funding trail maintenance.

Here we've cut out the log and put a skidder under it to help us roll it off the trail.

The view from camp near Lemah Meadows.

Amanda Goes Backpacking!

I weigh my fancy new pack.

Last week, I took Amanda backpacking. She's pestered me for years to take her backpacking, but she sets high expectations. She wants a flat trail. And beautiful scenery. And "not too far." Then she scoffs when I suggest the Alki Beach Trail. Sheesh!

As it turns out, I needed a ride to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness just east of Seattle since I planned to go on a Backcountry Response Trip (BCRT) with the Washington Trails Association (WTA). Rumor had it that dozens of logs had thoughtlessly fallen across the trail blocking horses, thru-hikers, and other backpackers along the PCT. And as it turns out, I was already familiar with this area, and I knew that from the trailhead to Pete Lake was--for a backcountry trail in the Cascade Mountains--surprisingly flat. And the view from Pete Lake was pretty darned sweet. And surely Amanda wouldn't have any complaints about a backpacking trip here, right? Especially if she brought large quantities of wine. =)

So off we headed to Pete Lake. We stopped in North Bend for lunch and picked up important gear like cheese and salami which I forgot to pack in Seattle. (Fun fact: The cheese and salami that I did originally buy for the trip are still sitting in the refrigerator.)

Amanda's not a big fan of driving on dirt roads, so I think she was happily surprised to learn that the trailhead only required a mile or so of unpaved roads to reach. Even the unpaved portion was very well graded without any washboards to make the ride unpleasant.

A few cars were already parked at the trailhead, and I hoped most of them were just day hikers or fisherman so we'd have Pete Lake to ourselves during the night. On weekends, that place is a certifiable zoo with the parking lot overflowing with cars. On weekdays--not so bad.

Amanda wanted to bring a tent, something I felt wasn't necessary, but since I had already loaded my pack up with close to a week's worth of food and carried a heavy bear canister, she was tasked with carrying the "lightweight" backpacking tent. (The terms "lightweight" and "backpacking tent" should never go in the same sentence together.) I strapped it to the back of her pack--my old pack that I used to thru-hike the Florida Trail, and we tried our packs out on a handy little scale Amanda bought as a birthday or Christmas present (I don't really remember which) for me a couple of years before. It's actually meant to weigh one's bag for flying purposes, as the packaging claimed, but I used it to weigh my packs and know how much weight I carried.

Amanda is not enjoying the weight on her back!

My pack came out to 42 pounds--on the high side of things, but most of the time, I wasn't carrying a 3-pound bear canister, a week of food, and four liters of water. The amount of water I carried really was ridiculous--this trail had plenty of water for the grabbing along the way. I just didn't want to stop and refill the water. I took the bear canister since I intended to leave my food unattended all day long as I did trail work and didn't want squirrels and other critters getting into my food. If it kept out bears as well, that's good to, but frankly, I worried more about smaller animals. Seeing a bear is pretty unusual in the wilderness.

This would also be a good time for me to test my new pack. Mostly purple (I do like that color), with a bright "don't shoot me, I'm a hiker!" orange top, and a silver racing stripe that made me look cool, it was another one of my homemade contraptions and, until now, was completely untested. =)

Amanda's pack weighed in at a hefty 30 pounds--the maximum weight that the pack was designed to hold. The tent made up a significant portion of the weight, but she was determined to bring it along in case the bugs were bad--not an unrealistic expectation.

I filled out the paperwork at the self-permit station as Amanda headed down the trail. "I'll catch up," I told her.

I did catch up, perhaps a hundred feet down the trail, which Amanda was bitterly complaining about the weight of her pack. I felt bad, but my pack was already filled to capacity and I wasn't sure what I could do to help. So she plodded along slowly, which was okay by me. We weren't in any rush. By my estimate, we had over seven hours until dark to cover just four miles. Amanda could certainly take as much time as she needed.

Amanda fords a creek.

After a good half hour or so and several rests, she loosened the shoulder straps and immediately felt better. Just by looking at her, I didn't realize she had tightened her shoulder straps so much, but once she figured out that they shouldn't be so tight, she practically zoomed down the trail. Not skipping, perhaps, but the number of rest stops decreased dramatically and her top hiking speed doubled. Wow--what a difference!

I think she started having more fun at this point.

With her large pack and inexperience carrying such heavy loads, she decided to ford a couple of the streams that a more sure-footed person might have crossed using fallen logs. I do believe those were her first deliberate stream fords, and she took to them like a fish in water. (On an unrelated note, we didn't actually see any fish in the water.)

Late in the afternoon, we finally arrived at the scenic Pete Lake with beautiful, snow-covered mountains as a backdrop. In the late afternoon, those snow-covered mountains are kind of washed out. The light really isn't ideal and it's definitely a much better view early in the morning.

We were also a little disheartened to discover a camp of 20 or so Boy Scouts already set up there. I was a little angry at them since I knew the maximum group size in this area was 12 and the Boy Scouts clearly and deliberately violated that rule. Aren't they supposed to be teaching kids to respect the wilderness and follow the rules?

I scouted up the trail a bit further looking for a campsite away from the scouts and found a nice one overlooking the lake. I went back and retrieved Amanda and we set up camp.

Amanda seems to be enjoying herself more since she
figured out her shoulder straps were too tight.

Immediately, we started setting up the tent. I pulled out all of the poles and started snapping them together, but the cords that were supposed to provide tension and keep them all together seemed unusually slack. Like they had rotted and no longer had any elasticity to them. How bizarre.....

This did not go over well with Amanda. No, not at all. She lugged that tent miles into the backcountry, and by golly, she didn't want her efforts to be in vain. But clearly, there was nothing we could do to fix the problem at this point. The tent was a bust.

"But you can become one with nature!" I assured her. "You won't feel claustrophobic in a tiny little tent!"

It didn't really help matters, though. In fact, it might have annoyed her even further.

What did help, however, was the small, plastic bottle of wine she carried. Nothing like a little alcohol to sooth the nerves. =)

Amanda also started a small campfire in a nearby fire right which she seemed to enjoy. Amanda has a real knack for starting campfires. I can't seem to get them started even when I have a large bottle of denatured alcohol and dry wood at my disposal, but Amanda's the MacGuyver of starting camp fires. Which is kind of ironic since she's more than little nervous handling lighters, afraid she'll burn herself with them.

With her wine in hand, now Amanda's truly a happy camper! =)

I worked on dinner, and Amanda said that she enjoyed watching me in my "natural element." I imagined the narrator from a wildlife documentary describing my actions in a whisper: "Now the hiker is cooking dinner with an ingenious little soda can stove. It appears that he's pouring what they call denatured alcohol into the stove, but he appears to be having some trouble with his lighter. Wait! There it goes! He got it going!"

Bugs did bother us all evening, but I didn't consider them to be especially bad. I've suffered through much worse, but to listen to Amanda, you'd think we'd been attacked by biblical plagues the likes the world has never seen. Shortly after sunset, the bugs finally went away for the night and we slept in peace.

 The next morning, we woke up bright and early. I did so out of necessity, planning to hike back to the trailhead to meet up with the rest of the members of the WTA work party, check in, and carry any back any tools I would need. I left most of my stuff in camp--especially the heavy bear canister stuffed with food. No sense carrying that all the way to the trailhead just to carry it back to Pete Lake a few hours later! Amanda left early only because I did. I guess Pete Lake without me just isn't the same. =)

Amanda enjoys her campfire.

Without the week of food weighing down my pack, I took the tent for Amanda and bounded down the trail without her. Even with the tent, my pack was considerably lighter than on the trip out. I hustled to the trailhead where a couple of WTA members had already arrived. Amanda made it back out 40 minutes after I did but before we had started the hike back to Pete Lake.

Amanda drove off, having to fly to work later that evening. And I hiked back up the trail after adding a small Corona saw and a grub hoe to my gear.

But I'll save that story for my next post.....

In the meantime, it's that time of year again for WTA's annual Hike-a-Thon! You'll see some of the work that the WTA does to help preserve and maintain Washington's hiking trails and scenic places in my next post, but they're a wonderful organization to work with and support. So please consider sponsoring me. This year, I'll spend much of August thru-hiking El Camino de Santiago through Europe and I intend to bribe anyone who donates at least $5 with a postcard from somewhere along my hike. =)

I read my Kindle--my new little backpacking toy for when I'm hiking through
Europe. (Would you believe it--they don't have a lot of English language books
in France, Spain OR Portugal!)

Sunrise over Pete Lake