Enter the Olympics

The morning went without a hitch. I was impressed with the efficiency that Scott and Steve worked with, but I couldn't forget that this was their first day of vacation and everyone always starts out strong. We had to get out to the ending trailhead by 9:30 because that was when we were getting picked up by the shuttle service. We were all interested to see what this shuttle service entailed. The owner/contact person of the business was Willie Nelson. I don't think it was the same one that we all know, but he had long hair and a beard and was pretty western. Unfortunately, we weren't going to be picked up by Willie, instead it would be his brother John.

We got to the trailhead after a pretty long drive, and we only had ~30 minutes to get ready. That entailed packing up all the packs and getting our backcountry permits. Needless to say, we couldn't get that done in that amount of time. John Nelson pulled up in a 1996 Chrysler minivan. He was a straight up mountain man in a cowboy hat. Really nice guy that told Steve to stop complaining about his pack being heavy because when John was 11 y/o he had to carry a 60 lb pack for a 5 day hike. Classic John Nelson. I think he liked us because we were listening to Three Dog Night and John started dancing around to the music. Classic John. After we were all set with everything we loaded up his minivan, said goodbye to Old Blue, and left for the Duckabush Trailhead. It was about a 90 minute drive to the TH and we had to take a gravel back road that John was nailing potholes on. He knew exactly what he was doing, but we weren't too sure about that.

Once we finally got to the trailhead, we parted ways with John, got our packs and were in the middle of nowhere with no one around us. Old Blue, my safety net of road trips, was 34 miles away on the other side of a mountain. Here we go. Once we started the hike, it was very cool. There was moss overgrowing on all the trees and it was very reminiscent of the Redwood forest with smaller trees. Steve and Scott got stung by yellow jackets within the first 5 miles, so that was a bit of a buzz kill for them (no pun intended.) We then had an unexpected climb over The Hump. It was a good warm-up for the 2nd day hike; The Hump was a 1000 ft climb over 1.7 miles. Besides that the day was a pretty simple hike. We followed the Duckabush River for most of it, and the color of the water was amazing. It was like the water of Crater Lake flowing through the forest. It was clear and blue, and we were all amazed by it.

Once we got to our campsite, there was another part there. We talked to them for a little while and they claimed to have run into a ton of snow coming over the pass. It took them 2 days to hike 7 miles. Luckily, the pass they took was not the one that we were taking, but we did know we were going to be getting into snow. Scott and Steve found some berry bushes and went nuts picking berries and eating them, just like animals. The campsite was right along some rapids on the river, so there was going to be an awesome natural soundscape for sleeping. We got a campfire going and shortly after called it a night to get ready for a big day 2 of the hike. ULTRA day 22/39: COMPLETE

JM