Hiking With Gadget Girl
It's All About The Adventure!
Resupply Day! Packed up early and enjoyed the sunrise on the surrounding hills (are they called hills at the 12,000 foot level?). The moon was also setting, making for very cool shots.
We continued our slow and steady upward pace up to the top of Forester Pass (13,180 ft).
Much to our surprise we were the only ones up on top. It was unusual not to have to elbow people out of the way in order to snap pics of views and signs at a top of a pass. There are definitely not as many people hiking this year.
On the way down the other side we were happy that there was just one patch of snow to cross and it was pretty slippery for trail runner shoes.
This was the slippery patch of snow, the worst of the patches.
I don't think I've seen these flowers on the trail before.
Ran into Big Mac and Bilbo and they told us that two days ago a fellow had a heart attack above Wallace Creek. Two cousins were hiking about a mile apart from each other and the first one came across him but didn't want to touch him because of Covid. Second cousin arrived, had DeLorme/Garmin device and used SOS to text help. Three hours later the helicopter arrived and med-vac'd him out of there.
Big Mac on the left and Bilbo on the right. Big Mac had a pacemaker embedded about four weeks prior to this trip. We were amazed he was out on the trail. Bilbo had to leave the trail at Kearsarge pass as he has diabetes and wasn't able to control his blood sugars on the trail.
Meanwhile we continued on and heard cow bells and lo and behold, here were a dozen or so burros or mules, whichever has the biggest ears. They were pretty friendly and mosied over for a pat on the head.
We had a long walk down, 3,740 ft worth, and then after lunch we pushed upward 1,827 ft to Charlotte Lake (it was agony, so steep) to meet up with our trail angels Greg and Duane who endured the challenging Kearsarge Pass trail to bring up our resupply. Whew. What a day.
But wait! The day is not over. We had finished dinner and all our food was stored in our bear canisters in the steel bear box in the campground. Duane yells out "bear in camp!" We thought he was kidding. Oh no, there was mister bear looking at us through the bushes. Aack!
He turned away to go to another campsite, a family of ten people (a major portion who were teenagers) who only had two bear canisters among them. A lot of screaming started, pots banging, and here comes the bear back to our camp.
This time he was quite interested in Greg's pack.
He started pawing it and pulled out Seasoned Strider's Ziploc bag that contained her used battery pack. Decided to give it a chew and see if it tasted like anything.
Of course we had to take a picture of the sort of chewed Ziploc bag with bear slobber and holes in the plastic. We were pretty sure the battery pack wasn't damaged.
Lots of yelling by us and by this time the local ranger arrived on the scene and showed us how it's done to chase a bear away.
Off the bear went to harass another campsite. More yelling continued. Bear came back two more times into our camp and by this time Duane took it upon himself to be the bear chaser. Although our packs were completely empty, there could be residue smells lingering so we decided to hang our packs high up in a tree. Finally, another group of campers chased the bear to the other side of the lake. All was quiet at 8:38pm. Let me tell you, I didn't get much sleep that night!
