8/29/17
15 miles
58 miles hiked total

It’s warm, pleasant and still down at six thousand feet, where we’re camped and I wake at five and lay there, waiting for Kodak to wake. It’s pretty hard not to just wake up your hiking partner when you’re up before dawn feeling shot full of electricity ready to go but then I also envy how hard he sleeps and I live vicariously through him, laying quiet in my sleeping bag watching him breathe. At last his eyes open up and he lights the flame in his alcohol burner and makes his pourover coffee with a generous amount of hot cocoa in it and shares some with me and then it’s time to walk.

We’ve got a five thousand foot climb this morning but it’s on trail so it feels like nothin. Oh beautiful switchbacks! I listen to pop music and practically fly with endorphins. Soon we reach the top and we’re in lovely cool pine forest and then we’re crushin off trail again, into the land of rounded grippy granite slopes and grass ramps where cliffs were outlawed long ago and everything goes, and gently too. Ramps on ramps on ramps, jewel-colored lakes and tarns, not a sharp edge anywhere. A steep sticky snowfield takes us up to Goat Crest Pass at eleven-somethin thousand feet, from which we can see more soft lands spread out before us, lumpy granite like play-doh balls that’ve been smushed on top of each other, folded and broken a bit but still rounded at the edges and stuck with tufts of flowers.

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We wend our way down these gorgeous ramps and I wonder, is this the place where you go when you die. In a few miles we’ll reach more real trail that will take us five miles downhill to Roads End, where there is a motherfucking snack bar, and we had talked about making it tonight, but the wonder of Grouse Lake snags us- what is life but a quest to sleep in every beautiful place- and presently the rain stops (it was raining) and a double rainbow arcs above the lake, and Kodak nearly loses his mind attempting to photograph it. Kodak pitches his tarp next to the lake in “storm mode” which is still like a palace inside but very secure and we eat our hot dinners and fall asleep to the patter of the rain, which has returned.

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