The big debate began this morning when I checked voice mail around 7am. There was a late message from Happy who said they would catch up to me if I hiked leisurely and then she thanked me for leaving them some fuel as they are running short. Oops! Miscommunication! What I said in my voice mail last night was that I had enough fuel to cover the group to Chester, their next food resupply 46 miles north…but that assumed they would catch up to me. Now I had to make a decision. Go forward and leave fuel for them on the trail in a ziplock bag? ( I had no other containers). Go back to Belden Town and get a container for fuel and leave them some there? Sit still and wait? I debated with myself for an hour and a half and finally after consulting with trail buddy Debi back in Portland, decided to backtrack to Belden Town to wait for the gang.
It makes for a lost hiking day, but all things considered, gives me a day of rest in the heat and a couple of miles of hiking with the pack. So I returned to Belden Town and found a lounge chair in the shade by the river to hang out on. There I spent a few hours until around 1pm when I got hungry and headed over to the resort’s restaurant/saloon/general store (let’s just say it’s 90% saloon, 10% the other). There, amongst dozens of bikers who rode in on Harleys for beer and lunch, I got a BLT and a coke and sat down to finish yesterday’s journal and to start today’s.
So, it’s now 3:15pm and no sign yet of my compadres. It’s bloody hot outside and there’s no AC inside, so it’s hot in here too. Robert McCray CD keeps playing (blues headline in Reno this weekend) and there’s lots of biker trash around and one hiker trash (me). More journaling to come when I see how the rest of day plays out. The key is I have to keep the gang out of the saloon when they get here and convince them to hike those couple miles out of town so we can go north in earnest tomorrow. The rest of the afternoon was so hot I could barely stand it even in the shade.
I made friends with some biker dudes and later did some reading and charged the cell phone battery. Around 5pm a car pulled up with an older couple and a guy who got out of the back seat with hiker clothes on. Unmistakably a thru-hiker getting back on trail. The only thing I was uncertain about was whether or not he had just received a hitch or if it was his parents dropping him off. After they left he slipped into the saloon and I waited a few more minutes for the cell phone to charge before venturing inside to see who this guy was. He was at the bar, so I walked up and asked, “north or south?”. He responded north and I said, me too and asked when he started. He said May 15th, that he had hiked straight through from the Mexican border, but had taken a lot of town days to earn money along the way to pay for all the expensive town stops that he wasn’t aware would occur. Drew and I became fast friends and I decided to have a beer with him.
About 30 minutes later I caught a glimpse of Happy and Bad Moon outside walking past the saloon. I bolted out the door and gave them big hugs and cajoled them to come inside to have a beer with me. We had a couple before Phantom and Whoop Ass came in, drenched in sweat from the hike. The reunion was complete!
We grabbed a table out on the deck overlooking the river and ate dinner while catching up on trail gossip. Before dark all six of us, including our new hiker friend Drew, packed up and hiked out together. We hiked to my exact camping spot and got here around 9:15pm. So my strategy worked…get a couple beers in 'em quick, then get 'm to hike out before dark! So, I hiked 1.5 miles south, 1.5 miles north, and ended up in the same spot as last night. A zero mile day technically! It was worth the wait!! Today’s weather; sunny and hot; low 57, high 97. Today’s mileage 0; cumulative 878.7.
