Day 95 : A pleasant surprise

23rd July 2013
Mile 1251 to mile 1266 : The Middle Fork of the Feather River to The Williams'
Mileage : 15 + 2.5

The Feather River has 3 forks, Lower, Middle, and Upper, and they cut through the terrain forming deep forested canyons. Most of the trail follows the tops of of a plateau like landscape at about 7000ft except for where it crosses rivers, which mostly flow west to east. Whenever this happens, the trail dives straight to the bottom of these canyons and climbs straight up the other sides. This is the situation at Sierra City, the Middle Fork of the Feather, and at Belden. The rivers are often over 3000ft, and at Belden almost 5000ft, below the plateaus and the temperatures are substantially higher, difficult to believe due to the intense heat of the plateaus, as a result. For this reason I was actually looking forward to the 6000+ft of climbing the trail had planned for me that day. The first 4000ft were completed at relative speed as it was up, up, up from the go that morning, and by midday i was at Lookout Rock admiring the view. At Lookout Rock, I saw a sign for a local trail angel at Buck's Lake, took a picture in case i needed it later, but otherwise didn't think much of it as i wasn't planning on on stopping there. Most of the angels are well known to hikers in advance, so we can plan to stop in or not, but this was a total surprise and so i hadn't planned on a stop there. By the time i reached Big Creek Rd however, I had changed my mind. PRT were still behind me, and i was trying to ease up on the pace to let them catch me, so decided i would go and investigate the local trail angels Terry and Nancy Williams. It turned out to be a very good idea, and they turned out to be the best Trail Angel experience i've had so far. There was no traffic going my direction on Big Creek Rd, so after 15 minutes i started walking down the road in the direction mentioned on the sign, and before long had found the Williams' cabin 2 miles down the road. The Williams are from the Bay Area, and keep a small cabin up by Bucks Lake to escape the worst of the summer heat. It was wonderful. I was the only hiker there that afternoon, but was soon joined by Chops, Rocks, Hercules and Daniela who turned up just in time for dinner. It turns out the Williams had had a large family reunion a few days before and were doing there best to offload all the excess food onto us hikers before it all went bad. The 5 of us did our best to help Nancy and Terry out and put our hiker appetites to work. Many calories later we were all snoring soundly in the cool evening air all congratulating ourselves for the making the decision to stop here. As i said it was the best Trail Angel experience thus far.

Clockwise from far left : Chops, Terry, Hercules, Rocks, Nancy and Daniela