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| A deer mangled my hat! |
Wednesday, July 11
I never
thought I would say a deer ate my hat, but there you have it. Did you see the
video? While walking back from the creek,
I was flabbergasted to see some trash laying on the ground, thinking someone
had irresponsibly dumped it there. It started to have that familiar look about it and when I got a little closer it and I recognized what it
was. My jaw dropped, I got angry for a second, before I started
laughing when I realized what had happened to my favorite straw woven Montana
hat. That pesky deer last night must
have picked it up, chew it to shreds and it looked like she stomped on it a few
times too. Maybe it was pissed at me for
trying to shoe it out of my campsite – I suppose she actually was there first if I think
about it correctly. There was no saving
the hat and I couldn’t leave it as trash, and I didn’t want to pack it all the way
over the remaining mountain passes. I
decided to cremate it. Bye-bye good old
hat of mine. It still was comfortable,
but I do admit that it was getting rather ugly.
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| Tiger Lilly |
The first
four miles of the day’s hiking was a relatively easy gradual downhill as the
trail continued to follow the Middle Fork of the King River till it hit 8,000
feet.
From there the trail turned east
and started climbing Palisade Creek as it headed for Mather Pass.
It’s still a lot of work climbing, but after
I did a food inventory this morning, I decided I could give some food away. It
shouldn’t be too hard to find some hungry hikers you would think and it wasn’t.
I met
a group of three hikers, Michael, his sister and his wife who were attempting
to hike from MTR to Mt. Whitney with only seven days of food between them, but
they were now realizing that it could take them a day or two longer than
planned.
I was able to unload about a
pound of Quinoa, a pound of Humus, and 8oz of honey on them.
Now they can take that extra day without
going to hungry.
It was nice hiking with
them for stretches of the trail too and we would continue to leapfrog past one
another for the next few days.
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| The weather looks good this way |
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| But it's getting darker this way |
My destination for today would be
Palisade Lake, elevation 10,613. Another
group of three from Los Angeles, Andrew, Chewy and Oscar were already camped by
Lower Palisade when I got there and they pointed me to some good sites just
above them. I found a nice flat spot on
a sandy granite slab that was relatively sheltered from the wind. The sun was still shinning on our part of the
lake but another hiker shouted to us that there was rain coming in down the
pass. Looking up the mountains we could
see dark clouds rolling our way, but they looked like they might not quite make
it. To be on the safe side I started
setting up my shelter. Being impossible
to get a stake in the ground up here, I used rocks to hold down the
corners.
After an hour of scurrying around
to make sure all my stuff didn’t get wet, those clouds weren’t any closer so I
decided to try fishing in the lake. I
saw some eight to ten inched beauties hiding in a small outlet channel on the
north side and I tried to catch them with a Sierra Hopper. There are quite a few grass hoppers out here
even at these high elevations right now and the Sierra Hopper has been
productive. But this time I was not
cautious enough as I approached the bank, and I spooked them before I even got
my line in. I climbed and hiked my way
to the other end of the lake by the inlet channel where I did catch a couple of
little ones that I released. On my way
back I tried one more time for those bigger ones, but they were on to me
already. That’s OK; I still got lots of
that chili. I tried cooking up some
quinoa, but it was very difficult at this elevation. Because water boils at a much lower temperature
up here due to the reduced air pressure, everything takes longer cook. I finally gave up, thinking that it might
cook better in the morning if I let it soak all night. The rain never did show up and the winds died
down in the evening too.
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| Lower Palisade Lake |
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| Golden trout on a Sierra Hopper |
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