Iowa

Its been a week I've been in Iowa now.

 Its really nice here, the weather's warm it feels so good. The humidity is very high and its extremely muggy. I love the feeling, the moisture, the earth here feels alive.  Everywhere there's green grass and vibrant green foliage, little birds flying.by and squirrels. Maple seed helicopters floating in the air. There's lakes and woods and huge plains, farms and people. Lots of people.  There's cities with trim yards and cookie cutter housing developments popping up mini mansions in the sub urbs. Normal-town USA. It feels so different from the dusty dry and lonely desert i've lived (happily) in for 6 months.

But Maggie lives in the country and her front yard is a corn field which stretches as far as the eye can see. She has a beautiful house where one can really watch the sky,  and the mid-west sky is usually interesting. Slowly through the densely hot and muggy day you watch the clouds building above. By the end of the day massive anvil shaped thunderheads have formed and then the sunset will light them impressively. Most nights comes the lightning and crashing rain which is always a good show.

this is a picture of lightning!

We're working hard to be ready for the Pacific Crest Trail by the time we leave here next Tuesday. We also need to see Maggie's friends and family for the short time she'll be in town after being gone so long. Its a lot to do but we've already bought all our gear and are happy with it I believe. My PCT base weight will be 18.5 pounds and that's going to have to do. Im happy to have gotten it  that low.

Today we finished making our food boxes and feel accomplished although there's still a lot to do.

We have 102 days worth of food pre-packaged and ready to be shipped to the little towns along the pct.

We'll start heading south on July 6th and pick up our first box the following day in Stehekin, Washington. "Start hikin!" Then our plan is as follows. 

                                                         

We'll get our next box on July 14th in Skykomish. It'll have 5 days worth of food to make it through the wilderness to Snoqualmie which will have 6 days. On July 25 we'll be at Whites Pass where we'll start the longest unbroken stretch of the PCT which is about 148 miles and we're packing for 10 days.

Then we'll be in Oregon.       

   

So August 3rd we'll arrive at Cascade Locks on the mighty Columbia River and won't receive a box there since we can resupply in that larger town. Our next box will be on August 7th at the Timberline lodge resort, which will have 7 days worth of food to get us the rest of the way to Sisters. We'll resupply in that town and continue onward. 

Our next box will find us at the Shelter Cove resort, that should be around August 17 and then we'll hike 5 more days to Crater Lake National Park. 6 days later we'll stroll into Ashland and finally on September 3rd, we plan to arrive in Seiad Valley California. 

Theres a few stops on the way, but we plan to hike for 155 miles before resupplying again. Off to Castella and then 5 more days to the beautiful Burney Falls state park. Then due to the closure of the Belden post office we plan to resupply for 140 miles in a town called Chester, and not recieve another box until Sierra City. We should get to Sierra city on or before October 2nd. 

Our next and one of our last few boxes comes to us at South Lake Tahoe on October 9th and it will have 5 days of food. We will also buy 5 days of food to get us to Tuolumne meadows in Yosemite. There we plan to come down, and by one means or another, bypass the high Sierra. We dont want to risk being trapped in a snowstorm in late October but who knows maybe we'll go for it anyway...only time will tell.

Either way we will recieve a box in our lovely little Lone Pine and hopefully can visit our winter home in Death Valley on October 20th. We will start hiking again at Walker Pass,  segment we've done before. After that we wont recieve another box for a month and rely solely on the trail towns of the Mohave desert PCT.

On November 23rd we'll hopefully reach our box in Warner Springs and finally pick up our last box at Mt Laguna 4 days later. Happy birthday Maggie, and we'll be arriving at the Mexican border around December 1st.  

After that...well we'll probably favor heading to Yuma Arizona over San Diego and live in our tent on the outskirts of town until we find somewhere to go. Back to Death Valley is possible, or hopefully to the Caribbean. We may take care of Laurels house in Moab for 3 months. And then its off to the Appalachain! But we'll figure out that next chapter when it comes.

Take the Long Way Home

May 18
We woke up on top of a small cliff looking down on a river and the highway below us in the Uncompahgre national forest.

It was a mostly uneventful day, we started driving outside Ouray and were headed for Denver. We took a scenic back road that should have brought us to Carbondale. I missed my turn and wound up going the wrong way. We were driving along the rim of a fantastic canyon which we didn't realize was Black Canyon of the Gunnison national park.

At some point, highway 92 arrived at Curicanti reservoir and ding! Something suddenly clicked in my mind and I recognized the place. I slept at this reservoir one year ago and had shot a rabbit here, how could I forget this place. Oh my god we went the wrong way! I suddenly realized. We had just added about 4 hours to the drive.

It took us a very long time to get to Denver and at some point we got loopy driving for so long at 10,000 feet, but eventually we arrived at Aunt Joan's house.  What a great lady she is!  She cooked us a salmon salad and homemade chocolate mint cake with strawberries.  Pears, fine cheese, and coconut almonds.  It was fun meeting her after hearing about her for so long.  It was also great to have a shower and play the piano at her house.

In the morning of the next day Joan fed us some more fantastic food: homemade chicken coconut curry soup, seaweed salad, garlic bread, spicy cayenne peanut butter, and of course more cheese, and apples, and strawberries and mint cake!  What did we do to deserve this!

Then we left Joan's house and found our way to a Denver Marijuana dispensery!  It was pretty amazing, we showed a very enthusiastic girl our ID's and in we went.  It looked like a doctor's office with 6 professional looking people behind the counter, all busy dealing with customers.  There was loud music playing and we were immediately greeted by a stoner/doctor in a white uniform.  He had a genuine, half baked, smile on his face and began explaining in detail about his products and the new law in Colorado.  He spent a half hour of his time giving us fantastic customer service, clearly he loves his job.  I bought weed with a debit card!  It really felt like the future is now, the rest of the country will eventually follow Colorado.  I believe they can't ignore this industry forever, it felt really cool to see history happening.

The fun-loving city of Denver is clearly stoned out of its mind and away we went, to cross the vast ocean of the great plains.  Eastern Colorado is a wasteland.  An expansive wasteland of dried up grass, mostly flat, some small hills.  The occasional wind farm speckling the horizon with hundreds of strange spinning turbines.
Then Kansas is really flat.  Flat as a pancake they say.  It was a warm sunny drive, but it wasn't long into Kansas before we wanted to stop.  We pulled off the interstate on a long lonely back road and drove away from the setting sun.  Finally we stopped in a small patch of woods where we could hide ourselves out of sight between the farms.

The next day we drove for 10 hours.  A straight shot across Kansas.  It was 86 degrees and extremely muggy and humid.  We sweated it out the whole way.  We were dazed and disoriented, spent a while eating Panera bread and wandering Kansas city.

 Finally, after a long drive northward across Missouri, with sweaty sticky butts, we arrived at Iowa.  The homeland.

The grass is green here, the trees and lakes more numerous.  The storm clouds gathering now, and as they broke on us as we passed through Des Moines Maggie was home!  A fantastic sunset and then wild lightning all around us.  Flooding rain and booming thunder as I drove through Ankeny for the first time.  Soon enough we pulled into the village of Alleman, and following along a the fresh sprouted corn field, which extends placidly to the distant horizon, we pulled into Maggie's mom's driveway.  They have a beautiful home, a rude cat, and Maggie and I got to sleep in her normal bed.  She said it felt like no time had passed since she had been there last 6 months ago.

Fire at the Orange Creek

May 17th

A great day. We've been on the road for 12 days now and our time in the southwest is coming to an end. Woke up this morning on the edge of the Rio Grande gorge. A very interesting spot, I wish I could explore more of this awesome river.

We drove off but found ourselves a little haunted still from the night before. We were driving north today and going far. Maybe we were a bit superstitious but New Mexico had a dark feel to us now, at least that area as we drove through more of the Carson forest. We passed abandoned towns and lonely roads lined with birch and aspen trees. Then we passed this ranch and I should have gotten a picture, but there was a life like dummy hanging from a noose from the gate of the ranch. The yard was full of junk, the place also looked abandoned. I don't know what creepy stuff has happened in this forest but the dark spirits certainly linger. That ranch was the last building we passed for many miles.

We saw barely a car as we drove a beautiful road towards Colorado. It climbed a mountain pass up to 10,000 feet. Lovely Alpine scenery, then after passing through a couple last backwards New Mexican towns, we suddenly popped out in Pagosa Springs Colorado! A place I passed through on my road trip to Montana last year! We love Colorado.

Went to Durango and drank some 5 hour energies to get crazy. We only had 2 hours of sleep the night before. We had a great time as we turned to highway 550, the San Juan Skyway. One of the most fabulous roads for scenery in the country I've been here before and it felt so great to revisit.

As we got closer to Ouray, we stopped more and more. The energys wearing off now we felt absolutely horrible. Silverton is a very beautiful little mountain town.

The highway was closed to Ouray untill 6:30 so we drove to a place called Iron Pour Park on top of Red Mountain Pass. It's an old abandoned mining settlement with a river contaminated bright orange from the mine tailings. There are also a couple mountains there that are bloody red colored it's a very cool spot.

So we finally rested after such a long drive, we were totally worn out. I went to cook our food and my propane stove exploded...! We were at 10000 feet of elevation with fresh propane cans and it sprung a leak which lit on fire, the stove became engulfed in flames. Maggie jumped so fast out of the truck bed and ran and I flung the flaming stove and all the food off the tailgate and onto the ground. We stood there a minute watching it burn and waiting for a possible explosion but it went out. There goes all our food! Actually we slowly cleaned up this huge mess and was able to pick all the food up off the ground, rinse it off and still use it. I built a fire and after some labor over wet wood we had food!

 After a long rest by the orange creek we felt great again and decided to drive onward to Ouray, a nice spot I know to camp. A little excitement in our day was just what we needed. The evening road was amazingly beautiful, the best part of the San Juan Skyway. Huge waterfalls pouring down the giant cliff faces and mountains. A beautiful overlook on Ouray.

Then the road going to the spot I knew it was closed! Crap, now it's getting dark and we need to find a spot. Oh well, and we walked around the quaint little town. We quickly found a spot on a cliff side in the Uncompahgre National Forest looking down on our river and turned in for bed.