Day 61 : Glen and Pinchot Passes

19th June 2013
Mile 791 to mile 809 : Glen Pass to Lake Majorie
Mileage : 18

Today was a very tough day. I didn't sleep particularly well due to the cold and the lack of a pillow. Usually, my clothes bag, along with whatever clothes i'm not wearing when i go to sleep, functions as a pillow, but as last night i wore prett much all my clothes, my head rested on a less than soft granite slab, which interrupted my sleep. I don't think Dishcloth slept well either as we both slept in til late, which is unlike him to do so. I lost my watch in Big Bear several hundred miles ago, so never know the actual time anymore, but it felt late when we finally got moving. We made it up the pass relatively quickly and sat resting and basking in the sun for a few minutes before continuing down the other side. It was at this stage that Pascal the mule man came to our attention. Pascal is a middle-aged frenchman who has lived in the US long enough to lose his accent to the point that i didn't know he was french when i first met him, quite a feat really. Pascal is attempting the  PCT this year using mules as pack animals. I first became aware of him at Kick Off where he presented his plan to use to PCT as a training run for hiking the entire length of South America. At first I thought he was someone who has extensive hiking experience, but i have since learnt that nothing could be further from the truth. As i now understand he started the PCT with his mules with no experience of either hiking, or of pack animals. About a month ago his name cropped up in conversation and some said that a rancher had forcibly taken his mules away from him as he was running them into the ground. For this reason i was extremely surprised to see him and his mules just below the north side of Glen Pass. Very quickly it became apparent that neither he nor his animals were having a good time at that particular. Jimmy and Daisy, a brother and sister pair, were clearly struggling under on the steep, snowy slope, and Pascal was having a hard time getting them down off the snow field. Although this year there is less snow than an average snow year, we are going through earlier than usual, and there is always some snow on the northern side of the passes, and Glen was no exception. Although i didn't see it, Daisy had slipped on the snow and had somersaulted some way down a snow and scree slope, and Pascal was doing his best to get her back on the trail. Having seen Daisy fall, Jimmy had panicked and had shot up the side of the snow field and wouldn't budge. I, along with several other hikers who had now appeared, helped unload daisy and get all the equipment back up to the trail while Pascal dealt with Daisy. Daisy, with the exception of a few scrapes on her legs, had escaped any serious injury, probably ironically due to the padding afforded to her by all the bags strapped to her that had probably made her fall in the first place. Other hikers managed to coax Jimmy back to the trail at which stage Dishcloth and I decided to push on. The Pascal situation had already delayed us significantly, how much exactly i don't know but i would guess about an hour, and we didn't want to fall any further behind the others.

Over the next couple hours or so we descended the north side of Glen Pass and finally arrived at the bottom of Pinchot Pass. For some reason i didn't seem to have much energy, and had to rely on sugar to get me most of the way up, which i don't often do. The climb was about 4000ft over 8 miles or so and was tough. What made it tough was not the gradient but the steps. I hate steps, up or down they are difficult, and this was no exception. On the ups they hurt your quads, and on the downs they hurt your knees, they are difficult..  I was knackered before we even started the climb, but up it we had to go. We managed to get up and over it before the sun disappeared, and were surprised to find Peter Pan and Hoop Dreams waiting for us at pretty much the first lake we came to. I wasn't expecting to catch them that night, but it turned out that they had gotten a late start today and had probably only been about an hour ahead all day. So PRT would be almost back to a full compliment for the next few days, though i say almost as there was no sign of Mr Green at the Lake Marjorie campsite. Mr Green usually sleeps in a hammock, and as the lake is just above treeline, there were no trees from which he could string his hammock, so he had pressed on. Although I saw him on and off over the next few days for various reasons, i wouldn't end up hiking with him until the north side of Silver Pass, some 4 days hike later.

The most impossibly blue lake I have ever seen

Pascal, Daisy and Jimmy