John Muir Part II: Sleeping With Strangers

Continued from Part I: God's Country...

I had intended to make this a 3-part series, following logically from the three stretches between resupply points, originally planned as 3 weeks. However, this one day was so memorable, that I decided it should get its own post.

Standing on top of Muir Hut following the most memorable night of my trip.

Day 7: Dusy Basin to Muir Pass

11.9 miles
Dusy Basin (10800')
Low Point: Le Conte Canyon (8750')
End/High Point: Muir Pass (11955')

I gave my guardian angel food-delivering-across-a-huge-mountain-pass-sister a big squeeze goodbye, leaving her in the questionable hands of a frazzled hippie (or more accurately leaving him in hers), and wandered back down to Le Conte Canyon wearing fresh clothes she had picked up for me and with my pack full of resupplied food, bandaids, toilet paper, and a new SD card. Partway down the trail, the cold rain started back up, although it wasn't heavy...yet. I hurried down the hill, hoping to catch the Boy Scouts before they packed up camp and left, leaving the stuff I had stashed with them unprotected against marauding hikers and marmots. I found them steps from where I had left them huddled around a fire, getting a reluctant start to their morning as the rain dripped down through the trees.

Waving goodbye to Jeannie on my way back to the trail
after her successful resupply mission.

I had a second breakfast of oatmeal from the scouts' extra food, a rare hot breakfast and a real treat. Two guys showed up from the south, the first Northbounders any of us had seen except ourselves (me and the Boy Scouts), and hungrily eyed the fire while pretending to look over a map with shivering hands until it got awkward and we called them over to warm up. A fire is a welcome thing on a wet, frozen day. After some shared oatmeal and a brief chat, they took off, and their departure reminded me that I still had over 3000' and 8 miles to go to get up Muir Pass, and then several miles more down the other side before I'd get to the next spot where I could camp. Anxious to get moving despite, or rather because of the cold and the rain (I wasn't going to get less wet standing around getting dripped on, I figured...little did I know), I packed up and told the Boy Scouts--the closest things I had to friends on that trail--that I'd save them a campsite in the Evolution Basin on the other side of the pass if they didn't catch me well before then.

The drizzle turned into a heavy rain, the wind picked up, and the day got progressively colder. Little did I know, having not had access to a phone signal or The Everpresent Internets since I started my hike 7 days earlier, a massive storm was moving across California, and rangers were closing off access trails to the JMT because of the danger of extremely cold weather, flash floods, and all manner of not-goodness. All I knew was that it was raining, and that I felt very cold.

I hiked as fast as I could to try to keep myself warm, although I never did warm up that day. I hiked for miles and miles without breaking pace or stopping to rest or pausing to have a snack because stopping meant freezing. I climbed slowly up toward the pass and the wind got stronger and the temperature continued to drop, and I shivered as I walked, I couldn't feel my face or hands, but I couldn't stop. There was no warm sheltered place, stopping meant freezing. It was cold enough, and I was wet enough, and tired enough, and my stuff was soggy enough, that I was scared that stopping could mean freezing to death.

The whole time I prayed that my sister had made it over her pass before the storm that was drenching and freezing me hit her, "Hit me with whatever you've got, weather, but give Jeannie sun!" I yelled at the Asshole Sky at one point. I found out later that she had been suffering through it too, and by the time she finally made it out to her car with the old hippie, both of them were in tears.

Rock Monster on the trail. My last chance for shelter on the hike to Muir Pass.

I knew I had to make it to the top of the pass, because that was the first place where there was shelter to be found, the famous Muir Hut. I had no idea what to expect from the Muir Hut was, but it was mentioned in my guidebook and the handful of wet, frozen hikers coming down off of the pass assured me that if I could just make it to the hut, it would be dry. But 8 miles is interminable in miserable conditions. I'd ask hikers coming down, "How much farther?" and they'd look at me with pity and reply, "Not close. Sorry." For hour after wet, windy, frozen hour. My brand-new sister-delivered poncho refused to stay on me in the wind, no matter how I tried to tie or duct tape it to myself. Protecting my backpack from the rain proved an impossible task, and I only hoped that my sleeping bag was staying dry (or rather not getting more damp) inside its garbage sack inside. At one point, the poncho blew up and tangled itself around my neck and, unable to muster the energy to curse, I started to cry angry, scared, cold, tired tears. I fought the urge to rip it off (and likely strangle myself in the process) and somehow managed to untangle myself despite my completely numb hands and shaking limbs.

And I kept walking.

Dripping trail on the way to Muir Pass

And walking.
And walking, counting my steps to distract myself from how horrible I felt.
And walking.
And walking, making bets with myself how many more steps it would be until I got to the hut. It was always more steps than I guessed.
And walking.
And walking.
Because stopping meant death, I was fairly sure.

Maybe it didn't mean death. Maybe I could have wriggled my sleeping bag and bivvy out and crawled inside before it got totally drenched. Maybe an exposed night in the freezing rain wouldn't have killed me, even if it would have been the scariest, most miserable night of my life. Maybe someone hiking down would have helped me back down the mountain to the more sheltered canyon and a campfire. Maybe.

But I kept walking, because maybe wasn't an option. I knew that no matter how hard the wind blew or how cold I got, I'd make it to that damned hut. And after five stumbling, shivering, nonstop hours, I saw the hut. 500 steps, I told myself, you can make 500 steps. It was a lot more than 500 steps. But I made it. Staggered up to the door. Pushed my way inside.

Muir Hut: the tiny little pimple in the middle of that pass.

Inside, the round stone hut was cold, damp, and dripping. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw two guys sitting together in a corner, steam boiling off of them. The Northbounders. After first eying me like the unwanted houseguest I was, they quickly felt sorry for a fellow frozen miserable hiker and helped me out of my soaked outerwear (I was too numb and shaking too hard to even get my backpack off), helped me get my dry change of clothes and sleeping bag out of my completely saturated pack, and made me a hot mug of coffee to help warm me up. The hot coffee changed everything, and I slowly started to feel my hands again, and slowly started to calm down, and the relief of being safe and with other people had me silly with exhausted gratitude.

They had decided to stay the night and wait out the storm, as had a Southbounder who was sitting quietly in the dark corner of the hut who I hadn't noticed at first. It was illegal to camp in Muir Hut, but we decided our circumstances were exceptional enough that John Muir would forgive us. I, for one, was done for the day. Or at least done until the storm stopped for long enough to let me dry out and get to a real camp. And sun and balmy Summer-in-California temperatures did not appear to be anywhere on the grey and dripping horizon. And I was glad I'd have company in that dark, dripping, isolated, cave-like hut.

Setting up camp inside Muir Hut

Once I warmed enough to function, I set to work trying to set up a means of protecting my sleeping bag from the vigorously dripping hut interior. Water was leaking in through the roof, running in streams down the sides and dripping at every stone step, and the humidity inside from the drippiness plus four soggy humans was approximately that of a Turkish bath. Damp + down are a bad combination in the cold, and I worried about the saturation state of my sleeping bag, and worried about staying warm through the night. The hut was drier and warmer than the outside, but still neither dry nor warm.

We cursed the blocked-off fireplace, not that there was anything around to burn. We napped, me curled up inside my bivvy sack with my poncho over my face to protect at least my top half from drips. We told stories and laughed. We helped dress each other's blisters and patch each other's torn gear. We made what hot food we could and drank hot tea, hot coffee, hot water, and when a Southbounder with a platypus full of bourbon stopped through, we drank that, too. There were some impressive people who trickled through as the afternoon progressed, but only a hardy handful. It seemed most people had decided to hunker down and try to wait out the storm. The Boy Scouts never showed up. I'd never see them again (I'm sure they survived the day, probably by staying put where I had left them, but I hope they made it through eventually!).

My attempt to make a dry space inside the hut.
When I woke up from my nap, everything was soaked.

By the time darkness fell, we were a group of five. The Northbounders, brothers Mike and Ash, had managed to suspend one of their tent flies from the interior walls of the hut such that we had a sort of indoor tarp protecting us from the drips, at least at the hut's center. We all made dinner, sharing goodies around (including my large bag of organic kale which my sister had left me with; this became a running joke and to this day kale reminds my hut friends of our night together). Khai, the Southbounder, set up his tent on a bench on one end of the hut. Mike, a special forces badass visibly antsy from the delay in his hiking plans, found the hut too dank and had a good winter tent, so opted to set up outside in the rain, which had let up slightly.

The rest of us slapped our Thermarests and sleeping bags down on a tarp in the center of the hut floor underneath the drip-protecting tent fly. As the night got colder and colder, and Khai's snoring and the howling wind got louder and louder and the water dripping from the tent fly edges crept ever inward, we all scooted closer and closer together. Which meant that I quickly became sandwiched between two strange men.

The tent fly that kept us sort of dry that night.

Under any other circumstance, being trapped in a cold, dark hut in the middle of nowhere with a group of strange men would have been uncomfortable and weird to say the least. On other backpacking trips, I've gone out of my way to avoid crossing paths with strangers. But that night I was enormously glad they were there. It never occurred to me to be uncomfortable. I was glad to be the person in the middle benefiting from body heat on both sides. It's okay to spoon with strangers when it's all in the name of surviving the night. Exhausted from the day, comforted by the warm human bodies around me, oddly soothed by the arrhythmic dripping and resonant snoring, I fell into a deep and much-needed sleep.

It's kind of astounding how the boundaries between complete strangers break down in situations like that, how everyone is stripped to being part of the same human family. For the 12 hours or so we were in the hut, all any of us cared about was staying warm and surviving the night. Once we were all convinced of our own survival, our second concern became making sure all of the other humans around us stayed warm and fed and hydrated and comfortable and happy. Except the brothers, none of us had met before that day. None of us had any reason to give half a shit about anyone else in that hut. Yet without discussion, without question, we shared what we had--our food, our cookware, our medical supplies, our limited water, our shelter-making gear, etc.--and worked together to make a cold, leaking, drippy hut a somewhat pleasant home for the night. We entered the hut unwelcome strangers, and left it a close-knit family. It was a miserable day followed by one of the most lovely and memorable human experiences of my life.

Four of five of the Muir Hut Family the following morning.

Continued in Part III: The Social Animal

Like the photos? There are more in the Photo Gallery, and more will be added every day as I sift through them all...there are a lot!

Feliz año nuevo chicos!

Happy New Year everybody!

I rang it in on the flanks of Cerro Tronador (Spanish for "Thunderer", and it looks as badass as its name...sadly the clouds didn't part for me to take photos of it this time) in a hike-in mountain hut full of fun people where the booze flowed and the music played until the wee hours of morning.

Rather than describe in words, here is the story in photos. And some words, but mostly photos. We like photos, right?

Part I: The miserable, miserable (but beautiful) hike

Anneke and I hiked four hours in the driving rain up the side of Cerro Tronador, climbing up through dripping forest with occasional cloud breaks that afforded us some jaw-drapping views. Within the first half hour, we were soaked to the bone, our water-resistant ski gear not up to the deluge. 

It got colder and colder as we hiked, but we were determined. We had a party to go to. Photo: Anneke on the trail as water pours down the volcanic rock.

We did have some pretty sweet views through occasional breaks in the sky (the breaks were never above us, sadly).

Castaño Overa Glacier on Tronador as viewed from the trail.

Anneke slogging though slush as we approached (finally!!) the refugio, rainbow in the background signalling better times ahead.

The refugio! Wait, no, false alarm. A building, but not the refugio.

The refugio! We decided midway up to stay inside, not in tents, because we were so cold and it was raining so hard and staying inside a warm, dry refugio after all that seemed (and was) infinitely nicer.
(Photo taken the next morning as the drunken revelers departed)

Part II: Safe and warm inside Refugio Otto Meiling

Due to our late start, we were the last ones to arrive at the refugio. We were greeted by a hut full of friendly folks who gave us a warm round of applause when we walked in, dripping and shivering. Drinks were quickly poured.

First order of business (after changing into dry clothes): open the wine Anneke hauled up.

Next order of business: cook dinner.

Table neighbor enjoying a book and some mate (in case you doubted we were in Argentina)

One of many cool mosaic lamps decorating the refugio

Part III: We came to party

We killed the five hours between our arrival and midnight by...drinking. Everything. It was new year's eve, after all...

Anneke gleefully pops the cork off of the semi-expensive (expensive is always a relative term when it comes to grape-derived beverages in this part of the world, God Bless the South!) champagne I hauled up the mountain.

¡Diez! Nueve! Ocho! Siete! Seis! Cinco! Cuatro! Tres! Dos! Uno!  ¡¡Feliz año!!

And then the party started for real. First song of the night: Final Countdown. Then: Carrie. Why? Because the refugieros love me (nobody forgot my name that night).

We danced in our flip flops until 4am. You'd think we hadn't just hiked up a volcano. It was an awesome night. (some of the dancing shots by Anneke)

Part IV: January 1, 2014!

Revelers sleeping off the hangovers the next morning. Incredibly, I did not have one. I may have drank like a fish, but I also drank a lot of water and danced all of it off. My sleeping bag is the red one at the bottom, next to the snugglers. Anneke managed to get a photo of me sleep-drooling in my sleeping bag, but I'm saving myself the embarassment here.

Breakfast in the refugio, watching the snow fall and working up the courage to leave.

Anneke was the first brave soul to leave the refugio in the morning.

But it was fine,and fun. The snow was dry and perfect. Me, backpack on, making a total fail of a snowangel. Photo by Anneke.

The snow was, in fact, so perfect that we had to stop and make a little snowman (Australian Anneke's first!!). Harder than we thought it would be, the snow was too dry to use my normal roll-the-ball expert snowman-building technique. Photo by Anneke.

We hiked down as a big group, I used all my Spanish words. Photo by Anneke.

In good spirits despite the rain and hangovers.

Happy new year!!

Epilogue: Some reflections

This new year marked quite a milestone in the life of this chica: the first new year in quite some time where instead of thinking, "good riddance old year, pleasegod let this new one be better," I rang in 2014 in the coolest possible way, all while thinking, "hotdamn, 2013 rocked!! here's to another one like it!"

2010 was the year I struggled mightily with a hopeless experiment, came down with a bad case of pneumonia, and ended a six-year relationship after years of friendship and fighting.

2011 started off hopefully with an exciting new romance and a new direction in my work, but crashed and burned hard with three consecutive cancer scares, surgeries, and the beginning of my battle with major depression.

2012 was an exhausting roller coaster in which I got engaged, got more bad cancer news, got left by my fiancé and, my heart badly and bitterly broken, I sank into the deepest emotional hole I've ever visited, ending up in a hospital after depression had led me to so give up on life that I stopped eating and drinking; it slowly got better from there as my PhD thesis project started to come together and I deepened relationships with family and old and new friends, but it continued to be an emotional battle.

2013 got off to a rough start with another broken heart, but quickly got AWESOME as I fought off the remnants of the mental and physical health problems I had suffered under the previous year, spent a lot of time working on my favorite desert island in the Pacific, wrapped up my PhD research and wrote my thesis, and then, in an incredible burst of everything going right, got a call from my doctor saying "all clear!" from the latest round of biopsies the night before I successfully defended my PhD dissertation in front of a room stuffed with dear friends and my family. August 16th, 2013, the day I became Dr. Frantz, was the best day of my life. And it kept getting better from there as I drove up the Pacific Coast from L.A. to my parents' house in Oregon, put the finishing touches on my dissertation, then flew to Santiago on a $5 air miles ticket to begin this life-changing and grand adventure.

So, to any of my friends out there who suffered through a rough 2013, I lift my glass to you and hope that 2014 is the year that Everything Gets Better. I know that can ring empty when you are sitting in an emotional well in the emotional dark. To you, amigos, I hope you reach out, I'm only an email away and you have my empathy and love. As Allie over at Hyperbole and a Half so beautifully put it, them's some dead fish, and it sucks. Hang in there.

Proof that life gets better!

And to those of you who had a baller 2013, WOOO!! Keep on rocking, rockstars!

To everyone: wishing you joy, random acts of kindness that make you smile, rain in the desert (but get the hell out before the flash flood, k?), and sunny powder days.

With love,

Carie

Navarino VII: Blizzards and Beavers

Part VII in the story of my 7-day solo trek on Isla Navarino, continued from Part VI: Bushwhacking North. To start at the beginning or to see the full list of Navarino episodes, click here.

The blanket of dry powder snow that I woke up to on Morning 6 in the tent

An all-day blizzard on Isla Navarino

It was so cold on my sixth night that it actually snowed inside my tent when condensation from my breath hit the tent wall, froze, and fell back down. So I woke at 6 am to a thin layer of snow on my sleeping bag and pack and ice encrusting the inside walls of the tent. The blizzard outside was still raging but I had a fairly full bladder so I decided to brave it.

In the time it took for me to open the tent door, use my poles to lean my ass as far out of the tent as I could, pee, and retreat back into the tent, there was a small snowdrift inside the tent that I then did my best to shovel back outside with my cooking pot. If you've been following this story, you've probably noticed that my reaction to morning adversity is to crawl back into my sleeping bag and sleep a few more hours, and that’s exactly what I did.

Around 8 am I woke again and it was somewhat warmer, so I poked my head out to see if it was safe to leave. It was still snowing hard and the tent was now buried in six-inch drifts (of dry powder! If I had had my splitboard with me, that might have made me happy). My retreat back into my tent and sleeping bag was like The Oatmeal’s Nope Godzilla scene (if you don't know what I'm talking about, click here and thank me later):

My response to waking up in a blizzard.

I may never have left my tent that day if, at around 9 am, I hadn't suddenly had to poop. Like two days earlier, it was preceded by that “DO NOT IGNORE” gurgle and although I pleaded with my bowels, “Can’t it wait? Have you seen the snow outside? Can we at least get things packed up first?” the answer was an insistent, “NO, must poop now!” So out I went. Sorry if this is too much poop talk and grossing you out (maybe put your breakfast away?) but the pile I left was so large that I was concerned. Was I not actually digesting anything? I needed all of the calories I could get. What was it I was eating? At first I blamed the garbonzo beans, but the timing was off… Time to head back to civilization. I had a cold, now diarrhea, and my feet hadn’t been warm or dry since the first day and were starting to turn a disturbing shade of yellow.

Stepping in holes like this probably hadn't helped my foot situation. Although I almost felt sorry for the poor cold microbes living in these stanky ponds...

It took a while to pack that morning. It isn't easy to maneuver inside a one-man tent and since the blizzard was still raging I needed to pack from the inside. Also, I wasn't terribly motivated to get up and go in the middle of the storm, but it wasn't showing any signs of letting up. So I cooked up a quick breakfast (very runny oatmeal since my supplies were low and one of Anneke’s Power Cookies), got my bag packed, threw it outside into a snowdrift, put on my rock-hard frozen-solid boots, packed up the tent, keeping it as dry as I could (the advantage of really cold snow is that it is fairly dry, so although I couldn't avoid including some snow when I rolled it up, at least it wasn't sopping wet from rain), and was off.

I decided to head back down the hill that I had struggled up the evening before in an attempt to find the alternate trail to and from Lago Windhond. The alternative was to head up into the mountains and back over the Dientes, which in the storm and after the past several days of snow in the mountains did not seem like a good idea. I thought the alternate route, which stayed at a lower altitude, would be easier and safer. So off I went, wading through shin- to knee-deep drifts of some of the driest powder snow I had ever been in (it was delightful, it really was, despite the cold I was enjoying myself…I love snow!). Downhill on the “trail” (a winter storm had blown down a lot of trees, including many that had once marked the way) was not much easier or faster than my long struggle up the evening prior, and I was once again reminded of Darwin’s description of his hike up Mount Tarn, or more specifically this time, of his description of the descent:

“The strong wind was piercingly cold, and the atmosphere rather hazy, so that we did not stay long on the top of the mountain. Our descent was not quite so laborious as our ascent, for the weight of the body forced a passage, and all the slips and falls were in the right direction.”

View from the ridgeline where I had camped looking out at where I had come from the day prior: Lago Windhond and Bahia Windhond beyond.

I arrived back at the bottom of the hill with only a few falls and was hoping for smooth sailing…if only I could find the trail.

Because beavers. I fucking hate beavers. After getting down the hill I spent all day shin-deep in muck and mud in a blizzard while trying to pick my way through the beaver-flooded terrain and fallen logs that were everywhere. Trail markers, when I happened to see any, were few and far between (I maybe saw 10 in an entire 6 hours of hiking after getting down the hill), the beavers having run off with them, apparently viewing the painted red stripes as “fell this tree” signs. Somewhere in that miserable valley there must be a beaver who decorated the interior of her fetid dam home with chunks of red-painted marker signs.

To my Caltech and MIT friends: your mascot is Satan dressed in fur.

Logpocalypse courtesy of the introduced North American Beaver

I was stuck in a wet maze of the logpocalypse. Between wheezy breaths, I cursed the beavers out loud while I walked (after 7 days without communicating with anyone, long one-way tirades directed at the beavers seemed like the thing to do). The problem wasn't a lack of track, the problem was figuring out whether that track was made by humans (probably the men whose tracks I had seen leading up to the refugio) and therefore indicative of a path passable by humans, or whether the track was made by beavers and would dead-end in the forest or lead straight to some filthy little beaver lair in the muck. Beaver tracks and human trails were indistinguishable in width and appearance except, when the mud was clear, the occasional bootprint. When the mud was not clear, occasionally I would see the shimmer of a parallel set of lines which could have been made by boot tread…or just accidentally by sticks. So for hours I honed my tracking skills and played the “human or beaver” game, picking my way through that final cesspit of beaverdom.

At one point I had stopped to wheeze for a bit when I had once again lost the trail to a dead-end of beaver track when a movement caught my eye. I turned toward the nearest beaver pond and saw a splash. MOTHERFUCKER, I thought. Sure enough, one of the filthy little beasts poked its furry little brown head out of the water and looked right at me. I stared at it, scowling. It floated to the top of the water so that its whole body was visible. I stared. It stared back.

“You filthy little piece of shit!” I yelled. Then wheezed for a bit.

The beaver didn't move.

I looked around me for a rock to throw. There were no rocks, only logs and sticks left by no doubt that very same little hellbeast. I looked around for a pointy stick and found a few, but remembered how poor I always was at javelin in high school track and field. Still… Patty at the hostel had mentioned that, in an effort to eradicate the beavers from the island, the government pays out $10 USD per dead beaver. I didn't think $10 was worth schlepping back a dead beaver to town, but maybe I could kill it and cut off its tail. I picked up a stick with a sharp, pointy end.

My nemesis

“Come here, I dare you, you fat brown turd.” I said.

The beaver swam closer. Still out of range.

“Your mother has big ugly yellow buck teeth, doesn't she?”

Beaver swam a little closer.

“You’re an invasive species. Know what that means? It means you don’t belong here.”

Closer. I suck at insults.

I stepped toward the pond, crawled up on a log, stick in one hand, and as I was stepping down to the other side, slipped and fell face-first into the mud. Fortunately not onto the pointy stick. I laid there, chest in the mud, backpack pinning me down, wheezing. I looked up and there the beaver was, just out of spitting distance, no doubt laughing at me. I didn't have the energy or the breath to laugh, but had to smile at the absurdity of it all. Me, hand bloodied on my spear during the fall, faceplanted in mud, beaver swimming smugly in its little engineered swimming pool as the snow fell lightly. In the standoff of me vs. beaver, the beaver had won. My species had inhabited this island at least ten thousand years longer than its species had, and yet here it was, the homes it and its forbearers had built essentially restricting human habitat to where the beavers were not. Having grown up in a part of the world where beavers have been largely displaced by humans from their native habitats, there was a certain poetic irony in that thought, and I granted the beaver his last laugh as I limped away.

I stopped to make camp at 7 pm having not really stopped all day except to try to figure out where I was and where I was going, pulling cookies and pieces of a sort of gross butter and mystery-paté sandwich as I walked. I was hungry, soaked, tired, but the lake that I stopped at was gorgeous and surrounded by high mountains, it was snowing lightly, and it was hard to not feel like I had landed inside a beautiful End of the World snowglobe.

Inside my end-of-the-world snowglobe

I unpacked and set up my wet tent. It had been so cold when I had packed it in the morning that the ice had remained as a thin sheet on the inside walls of the tent and had slowly melted throughout the day, soaking the tent from the inside as I walked. My sleeping bag was slightly damp which meant it was going to be cold. I wiped the inside of the tent down as best I could and try to let the bag dry (unlikely in the below-freezing weather) while I cooked dinner.

Dinner was spaghetti (again! But spaghetti makes great trail dinners and I can’t say I was sick of it…although being starved at the end of a long day means I was just grateful for something—anything—to eat) with pesto seasoning and a few scoops of the weird-tasting mystery paté, and, again, packaged instant pumpkin soup mixed into the pasta water. Although by this point I had gotten the hang of the soup-water proportions and the soup finally tasted pretty good. I threw a scoop of butter into the spaghetti for good measure. Then another into the soup. Calories.

I prepped lunch and breakfast for my final day in the morning, pre-packed my bag for a fast exit when I woke up wanting to get an early start, and slipped myself a melatonin in hopes of getting myself to sleep despite the damp and cold. I had a long day ahead of me with more beavers to come and did not trust the weather to get any better, so I was going to need the energy. It was full daylight when I closed my eyes at 9 pm.

View from near camp on Night 6

The story continues for my final day of the trek in Navarino Part VIII: The Feral Swampbeast Returns to Civilization

Navarino VI: Bushwhacking North

Part VI in the story of my 7-day solo trek on Isla Navarino, continued from Navarino Part V: Bahia Windhond or the day I stood naked at the end of the world. To start at the beginning or to see the full list of Navarino episodes, click here.

Some of the remnants of the snow patches around the tent after breakfast.

I woke up after sleeping for eleven hours feeling decidedly under the weather. I had a headache, sore throat, full sinuses, and felt absolutely exhausted. But I got up and opened the tent door to find patches of snow around the tent from the storm overnight.  I made myself a sad breakfast of runny oatmeal (next time: pack more oatmeal) mixed with trail mix and honey, packed my pack, and headed back along the shore of Lago Windhond toward the refugio.

Lago Windhond

I walked slowly along the lake, stopping often to empty my sinuses and observe and note the changes in the rocks along the shoreline, but still made it back to the refugio in three hours and change. It was cold, but I made a sort of lunch with crumbly packaged wheat pita bread (having exhausted my supply of the much tastier and more robust fresh Chilean flatbread), butter, and a mystery pate smear. The treat, however, was the garbonzo mash, and I ate half of what was left. The flavor, garlic, and salt was just what I was craving.

I was back on the trail by shortly after 3 pm after having left my name with the others in charcoal on a wall inside.

Signature

I turned on my MP3 player for the first time on the trip—which had miraculously also survived the swim in the Death Swamp three days prior—for an energy boost. This time I followed the trail (which was mostly intact and visible at the refugio) instead of going through the bog I had come in on. It felt good to be on a trail, knowing I’d finally make good time again. Even if “trail” meant largely sparsely-spaced sticks in a different peat bog with the occasional boot print from the guys who had come through several days prior to reassure me that I was on the right track. For a good hour, I was moving fast.

But beavers. Beavers, goddamned beavers, who once again were the bane of my existence having absconded with critical waymarkers in a confusing beaver-y area. After trying in vain to re-find the trail after crossing the beaver zone, I gave up and started to reluctantly climb the ridge the map said the trail climbed—the ridge I had avoided on my way down to the refugio three days earlier. The beavers and winter storms had turned the previously forested ridge into a labyrinth of fallen trees.

Domain of the Beavers

Here’s the thing about a labyrinth of fallen trees: it’s a jungle gym. And climbing a hill over logs, attempting to crawl under logs, balancing on slanted logs to climb over other fallen logs, shimmying up logs too slippery or narrow to confidently walk on—all with a pack—once again progress slowed to a literal crawl. What would have taken maybe 20 minutes with a good trail took over two hours of ducking under, crawling over, and falling into trees. 

It reminded me of a passage from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, which I had been reading on my borrowed Kindle, about a side trip he made to climb Mount Tarn (on the coast south of Punta Arenas in Tierra del Fuego), just 200 km to the NE of where I was on Isla Navarino:

“We went in boat to the foot of the mountain (but unluckily not the best part), and then began our ascent. The Forest commences at the line of high-water mark, and during the first two hours I gave over all hopes of reaching the summit. So thick was the wood, that it was necessary to have constant recourse to the compass; for every landmark, though in a mountainous country, was completely shut out…So gloomy, cold, and wet was every part, that not even the fungi, mosses, or ferns could flourish…it was scarcely possible to crawl along, they were so completely barricaded by great mouldering trunks, which had fallen down in every direction. When passing over these natural bridges, one’s course was often arrested by sinking knee deep into the rotten wood; at other times, when attempting to lean against a firm tree, one was startled by finding a mass of decayed matter ready to fall at the slightest touch.”

The hill was muddy so even when I had ground (versus fallen trees) to walk on it was difficult. More than once I slipped and fell, each time grateful that the branches and sticks were just enough out of the way that one didn’t end up through my eye. After my fifth slip with branches alarmingly close to my face I became so certain that this climb was going to lose me an eyeball that I amused myself for the next hour of the following slog by trying to figure out how I would deal with the inevitable loss of an eye.

Would there be much blood? There are blood vessels in the eyelid, but to the eye? Could I just get by with sticking some gauze in my eyeball-less socket and call it a night? Maybe I could save the eyeball (assuming I could find it in the mess of logs and bushes and mud) and maybe it could even be rewired or something? But what if it was one of those blood-gushing injuries? Then I’d have to light a fire, get a stick glowing hot, and cauterize my own eye socket. That did not sound fun, but I mentally prepared myself for the possibility. At least it hadn’t rained since morning and there was relatively dry firewood around, so I probably could take care of business without having to move too far from where I fell. And once I cauterized my eye socket and made it back to civilization then I’d have to wear an eye patch because glass eyes look weird. And if I had to wear an eye patch then I should probably just go all out and dress like a pirate because people would be less weirded out by someone with an eye patch if they just imagined I was a pirate than they would be a normal person with an eye patch or a glass eye. Or definitely less weirded out than by a person with a puckered stick-cauterized vacant eye socket. And isn’t that a sad statement on our treatment of people with disabilities? And on my train of thought went.

It looked like this for hours.

Incredibly, I made it two hours later to the top of the ridge with both eyes intact, the only injury a puncture wound in my right hand. Better than having to cauterize my blood-gushing eye socket with a red-hot stick for sure. Sure enough, at the top of the ridge I found the trail again, although it looked like I wouldn’t have been much better off if I had found it at the bottom of the hill judging by the trees blown down in the “trail” at the less storm-affected ridge top.

By that time it was almost 7 pm so I started looking for a place to camp, especially since snow was starting to fall. No sooner had I found a spot and put up my tent than a full-on blizzard started, coating my tent in a two-inch blanket of snow as I tried in vain to start a fire for half an hour in order to melt snow for water. I shook the snow off the tent-turned-igloo, scooped it away from the zippers with my once-again-wet feet, and let my trusty camp cooker do the snow-melting job. I was trying to save gas with the fire, but oh well, I still had plenty of gas to last the final two nights, I hoped.

My campsite, just minutes after setting up the tent.

So I melted myself some snow and the resulting water was half sticks and leaves but tasted wonderful (and was clear vs. the weird red of the water the previous two days), and I even managed to cook myself a feast of multi-colored pasta with butter, my second package of tuna, some more mystery seasoning, and pumpkin soup again with the leftover water. All cooked by setting the stove outside in the snow and hiding in my tent, periodically thumping snow off the tent, reaching an arm out to check on the progress of the cooking, and retreating again for a few more minutes. The cooling of the gas can from the loss of gas while cooking caused the can to freeze solidly to the ground, and I was unable to pry it off of the ground, so left it in the snow overnight to deal with in the hopefully warmer morning.

Meanwhile, snuggled up in my sleeping bag, I planned a route for the morning. I decided to cut down to the valley I had just come from since with all this snow I didn’t think continuing on this trail up into the mountains was wise. I plugged my phone in to my spare battery bank to charge since it was getting low on juice and I might need the map and GPS on it. I was in the habit of keeping all of my electronics in my sleeping bag in order to keep the batteries warm and preserve their charge. Great idea in theory, but of course I promptly rolled over on the whole charging setup, broke the tip off the charger, and that was the end of that. No matter, I had managed to get the battery up to 70% first and had already plotted my GPS waypoints, so as long as I didn’t screw around with the phone too much in the coming days I figured I’d be okay. Still…dumb.

Then I settled in for my coldest night yet.

Snow sure is pretty though.

Continued in Part VII: Blizzards and Beavers