Today was probably the toughest and scariest day I have ever had in my life.  It took us from 6:30 am till 6:30 pm to cover just 6.2 miles of PCT.    It’s a good thing we had a wonderful camp last night and slept very well.  (No wonder!  We were both wasted from battling the snow!)  We waited until 6:00am to get up, to give the snow time to soften. The other hikers camped nearby waved at us from their tents as we went by, and we waved cheerily back, thinking, “Yahoo! Pretty soon we’ll be across Fuller Ridge and down out of the snow!” 

No such luck.  We very soon lost the trail again, and it took a long time before we finally relocated it.  And after that, the rest of the day  turned out to be  agonizingly tough. We hardly saw the trail at all, except for one junction–everything was buried in snow.  We had to contour on hard, icy snow along steep mountainsides.  Crossing these was absolutely terrifying for me, because I knew that if I slipped, it was a long way down.  All I could do was pray and keep putting one foot in front of the other.  My ice axe got quite a workout! 

 I ended up covered with bruises and scrapes from many falls. Sometimes the ice axe “self arrest” worked, and sometimes it didn’t. One time when it didn’t, I (thank God) landed into bushes. The other thing that I ended up doing (since my pants were already torn) was to glissade down steep hillsides, where Bill would bootski or plungestep. (It turned out later that though this was a lot faster, it was also scraping the skin off my rear end.  I was in so much pain from all my bumps and bruises that I didn’t even realize what was happening.  I forgot that snow is actually a lot like sandpaper, and that pioneer women used to scrub pots with it!)

 What made it even worse was that Bill was just bouncing along fearlessly and happily.  He spent probably 80 % of his time today waiting for me as I took a half hour to cross a snowfield he’d done in less than 2 minutes.  This made me feel awful, and it was very discouraging.   As a result of my being slow, we were passed by several hikers, all young, strong, fearless guys.  Their approach to a traverse on steep, icy snow was to slip, slide, laugh and joke all the way across, where I was doing the 1) Chop step with ice axe   2) Plant ice axe firmly on uphill side of the step  3)Step into the freshcut “step”  4) If it feels secure, repeat Steps 1-4.   Several times I tried to be braver and just slip ‘n slide across like Bill and the guys do, but every time I tried that, I slipped and fell.   I only cried once, and only for a minute, after one particularly scary fall.  Other than that, I prayed like crazy for just plain courage to keep going.

 Other than that, the weather was glorious, the views and scenery awesome.  It really cheered me up whenever I felt particularly bad.  I was VERY grateful for such a beautiful day!  We were so busy battling snow that we never got around to eating breakfast till 10:30 am, and lunch was also very late–2:30 pm.  Eating was a very welcome break from the snow!    And I also realized something else that made me feel better–I am the only woman up here!  Every hiker we have seen is a guy, and a young guy at that.  Bill is the only old guy, and I am the only woman we have seen.  (Found out later that there was one other girl, one day ahead of us, named Not a Chance.  She made it through with her boyfriend Croatian Sensation.  She told me later how hard it had been for her, too.)

 Around 6:00pm, among the rocks and snowdrifts, we found a dry ground campsite and collapsed— but with an awesome view of Mt. San Jacinto!  My arms ache from chopping steps,  my quads ache from constant uphill/downhill, and my rear end, well, it REALLY hurts.  My prayer tonight was something like, “Lord, PLEASE help us get safely off this snow tomorrow!”

Walk to Rivendell: Yes, still in Midgewater Marshes