Day 5 – Garnet Lake to Red’s Meadow Resort

Beat down today. Still bummed about my phone. Five fifteen alarm, and I can already hear the mosquitoes buzzing outside my tent. No cooking this morning, just breaking down camp and moving. I washed off in a river yesterday and forgot to apply sunscreen afterwards, so I’m sunburnt as hell.

There is no endless supply of new mountains and valleys. I’m staring at chain of peaks that fade into lighter shades of blue, as far as I can see. The foothills in this valley are brimming with pine trees that look dusty in the cold, yellow sunrise.

The paths right now are strewn pierces of granite. It looks like it was dynamited through from Garnet lake. Maybe it was. The bugs are ridiculous today. I wore a head net while hiking, which was awful. I ditched it when I forgot I had it on and tried to spit.

I hit the zone today. Two hours without a break. Like rowing a boat over waves of dirt and rocks. Past the edge of lonely lake after lake, and over the hills between. I rolled past Devil’s Postpile into Red’s, already 13 miles in, at 2pm.

In Red’s, I met two guys also hiking solo named Tim and Ben. All of us picked up our resupply buckets and realized we had far too much food. We ended up pawning off our extra stuff at a picnic table we shared, trying to outsell one another to fellow hikers and tourists, like some kind of reverse bazaar.

“You like chocolate? Have a snickers.”

“Try my coffee smoothie. Take another for your wife.”

We pitched out tents together at the backpackers tent and returned to Red’s to eat at the diner. As I gave my name in for a table, a bar customer who overheard went, “Charlie…Roe-lock?”

He told me he had my phone. I dropped to my knees in disbelief. He found it after Donahue and carried it a day and a half south, even taking pictures along the way! He figured he had a good shot of finding me in Red’s Meadow. He called himself Rambo, and I owe him big. All hikers, I owe big.

I spent the rest of the night reconnecting with the WiFi at Red’s and my phone. When I got back to camp, I saw maybe twenty new tents packed into the small bear box. Busy night.

Before walking into camp, I turned my headlamp off and looked up. So many thousands of stars. An impossibility of them. The larger constellations, the ones I know, shone bright and immutable. But the spaces between were filled with stars, like the sun blinking off waves. A dewey spiderweb of pinhole lights. They felt so thick as to be tangible, like I could get a ladder and brush the night sky.

Every day is more beautiful than the last, and I’m really just starting out.