1982: The Pasaytan Loop, page 7

Another Hopkins Lake sunset photo!

If it gets really awful, as in snowy/miserable/awful, I can always bag the west section of the trail to Ross Lake and just head east and drop down to the West Fork of the Pasaytan River again. We'll see how it goes; there's plenty of time to panic later.

I must admit that it was a bit of a struggle to get here today. I'm not as young and spry as I used to be. Micki didn't seem to have any problems, but I kept having to stop and rest. Big deal – 26-miles in two days, over moderate terrain. But, as I seem to remember and often reiterate, on these long trips it usually takes until the third day to really get going. And even if we don't extend the trip by going west, it will still be a long trip of 50+ miles just to head back via the Pasaytan River.

I know some of my fatigue has to do with the fact that I did not eat dinner at Holman Pass last night.  I was too cold, it was too wet, and I didn't want to take the trouble to heat up water. I figured that the big dinner and breakfast at Harts Pass would last me for a while.  Somewhere along Goat Basin, I finally realized something else – I was dehydrated. I hadn’t drunk anything since breakfast and not much the day before. So I started eating snow and felt much better. Even Micki took a couple of mouthfuls. Consider it a Cascade vanilla snow-cone!

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