Mmm, going to try to squeeze in a couple of last July posts. I've been in the King Range along the Lost Coast, out of electronic communication, for the past few days. Here's the story, or at least as much of as it as I can relate without getting terribly sidetracked. (Note: Too late. Already terribly sidetracked. In fact, wrote a whole 'nuther update while editing this one.)

Neil, a Branner dormmate, stopped by Dire Wolf on his way from Los Altos and picked me and my gear up. We then headed for San Francisco, with a pit stop planned at the REI in San Carlos to get some white gas for the stove. All that we had in the way of directions was that we knew it was visible from 101 North, so we took the first exit after we spotted the green block letters, and then two completely arbitrarily decided turns after that. Miraculously, we'd gone exactly the right way, bolstering my stubborn faith in the "eh, just drive and you'll get there eventually" school of navigation. Neil also claimed to be a docent, which made me really excited. Most people are a little more logical and just get frustrated when I do that.

This artificially-inflated confidence was to haunt us in a short while. Mapquest had told us to take the Mission/Dubose exit in San Francisco, for which no sign ever came up. We soon ended up on the Bay Bridge to Oakland, and spent a good twenty minutes circling around Jack London Square before we found a way to get back on it toward San Francisco. Let me tell you, Oakland must be boycotting street signs or something. It's as if they want you to stay in their city so badly that they decided to not publicize the freeways at all.

We finally got to Molly's around 10, and after tossing around a generous offer from her parents to stay there for the night and get an early start the next day, decided to drive on that night. Neil pulled a stellar and fairly uneventful driving job and got us to Shelter Cove around 3am, and decided to stay there for the night so that we could rent extra bear canisters at the general store before heading out in the morning. We just set up our tent in a foggy RV camping lot close to the ocean, and fell fast asleep.

Being in no real rush the next day, we languidly got up, packed, and drove up a dozen or so dusty, rocky, windy miles to Saddle Mountain and were on the trail by 1pm. We'd found a website detailing a loop that would take us across varying terrain, from Saddle Mountain down to the ocean via King Peak (the highest point in the area at 4,087 feet) and the Rattlesnake Ridge Trail, along the Pacific Coast for a few miles, and then back inland on the Buck Creek trail.

The King Crest trail was winding and a little bit uphill. After a while, we reached the ridgeline and we constantly rewarded by amazing views of mountains to the east as far as the eye could see, and ocean so smothered by a low, squatting fog that it was impossible to tell where the ocean ended and the sky began. We stopped for a while on Kings Peak for pictures, but was a thrilling but inconveniently strong wind soon pushed us onward.

We'd hiked for several hours in the hot midday when our thoughts turned to our quickly-emptying Nalgenes. We had both iodine and a filter, but... no water. The maps we had at our disposal were a photocopied (full-sized, but black-and-white nonetheless) topo map last updated in 1970, and a small BLM map that depicted trails, but neither water sources nor topography. We tried to salvage some useful information out of that, but only came across some dry beds that might have held creeklets during the rainy season.

In the spirit of "eh, just hike and you'll get there eventually" (see "eh, just drive and you'll get there eventually" above), we figured that any route documented on the BLM site had to have water sources along its way. Sure enough, about a half-hour down the steeply descending Rattlesnake Ridge trail, there appeared a 4x4 branded with "SPRING" and an arrow in bright yellow. Whew.

We decided to set up camp in what we'd later find out was called Bear Hollow Valley for the night, even though it was only just after five. To unwind, Molly read, I wrote some postcards, and Neil decided to go running. See, he runs distance for Stanford, and they have a very detailed summer training schedule... which can't even be deviated from after hiking almost 8 miles with a heavy pack. There's Division I sports for ya. It was so windy, even in that dip in the trail, that stakes were definitely in order. When even dogged hammering couldn't make them take a hold in the rocky soil, we ended up tying the tent to some nearby tree trunks, which worked pretty well. We then cooked and ate a monstrous burrito dinner downwind.

Despite the bluster, I really thought a campfire would be a good way to kill off the s'mores makings and get us sleepy enough to go to bed. Some smart predecessor had arranged the fire ring so that there was a little triangular pocket on the lea side of the wind for starting a fire, but a lot still blew through the cracks. I swallowed my patience and my ego, and scrunched up a small wad of toilet paper, which caught well and good immediately. (One thing I'd like to accomplish is to learn how to reliably build a fire with nothing more than a knife and a lighter.) With the obligatory s'mores stretching our stomachs, we started singing all the happy corny camp songs we knew.

The next morning, we again took our time and didn't get on the trail 'til midmorning. The constant descent reminded me of Anna and our last day in the Olympics, where we spread out our arms, pretended to be airplanes and ran downhill to the trailhead in anticipation of ice cream and running water and showers and pizza to no end. Just as the trail met the creek that it would parallel the rest of the way to the ocean, we met a trio, their dog, and their pot. The dog wasn't faring so well with the steep downhill and kept trying to stay submerged during creek crossings; it was clear that the dog's owner felt really badly.

The trail crossed the creek several times, and about two miles away from the ocean, we couldn't find the continuation of the trail after a crossing. Undaunted, we decided to just follow the creek in the dry parts of the ever-widening bed. The rounded rocks made the going a little slower than the trail would have been and there were several hopeful pokings into the ledges around us in hopes of rediscovering the way, but we eventually decided that it would be simplest to just follow the creek bed down to the ocean.

Big Flat was accurately named. It was big. And flat. Almost like Sand Beach, which was sandy and a beach. The black sand was coarse enough not to blow messily into everything, and warm enough for us to take delicious naps after our peanut butter, pita, and gorp lunch. Food, nap, frisbee with a dried-up starfish (surprisingly aerodynamic!), food, nap, and then it was time to fill up our bottles from the Big Flat Creek and head out. It was slightly disturbing that the creek had piddled out to a small pond about a hundred yards inland whose water was flowing backward, but we had used a filter and it didn't taste terrible—until you remembered that a flock of birds had recently been flapping around and losing feathers in it.

We got on the trail where it was a packed path among grassy hills rolling gently above the surf. Then, without any notice, we were on a superexposed path with cliffs rising steeply to our left and dropping quickly and dangerously to the sea to our right. And then the trail turned left and stopped.

We stood, flummoxed, for a good minute before we even considered the other option. It seemed that, where it'd turned left, the trail could also have kept going straight off of the cliff. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the left turn was simply a wrong one reinforced by every mistaken hiker, included us; the seeming cliff, in fact, had enough solid holds jutting out of it to make it climbable. We threw our packs off of it, climbed down, put the packs back on, and started walking on the shore of rounded rocks. Ludicrous, and ludicrously fun.

A couple of miles later, at Shipman Creek, we ran into a lone BLM ranger who told us that the best—and only—campsites between there and the Buck Creek trail were at the mouths of each of those creeks, and that there was already a bunch of nine guys at Buck. Maneuvering across the rocky shore took longer than we'd expected; while we were getting hungry, we didn't want to have to do another mile and a half of it before starting up the legendary Buck Creek trail the next morning, and so decided to press on. Between the two creek mouths, there were most obvious signs that it would have been impassable during high tide. Kelp was strewn everywhere and waved nipped at our heels, demanding a quick sideways scurry whenever an especially high one came crashing in. The cliff face rose close to perpendicularly for at least a hundred feet, wetted by trickling water that sustained some grasses and bushes and moss.

The amazing scenery, combined with the concentration required to pick the best path among the rocks, kept me far from boredom or weariness, and we reached Buck Creek before long. We waved a hello to the smiling guys nursing their cans of Foster's, who pointed us to a third tier of the creek mouth where there was more than enough room for the three of us. We set up camp and started to chop up vegetables for dinner, but I couldn't for the life of me get the stove to light. There was enough hissing and dribbling to prime it, and once even to get it lit, but that went out not thirty seconds after. I took apart and cleaned every single freaking component of the stove that I could, to no avail. Another big gulpful of pride (I've learned to stomach it better after Assateague) finally led me to suggest that we ask the guys downhill to use an extra stove. After doling us some of their "bug juice" of diluted rum and cold creek water and raspberry Kool-Aid, they told us their story while we cooked our respective dinners:

They had been friends since high school, had been taking an annual reunion backpacking trip since then that'd grown from three guys to nine, and were thirty-five. That meant 17 or 18 years of annual trips, for which some of the guys flew back from Chicago or Texas or Michigan... While I suspect that any annual reunion of Edisonpeople wouldn't entail any backpacking, it was impressive and amazing and inspiring that they'd been able to carry on the tradition, much less the friendships, for that long.

The ranger had enlightened us that fire restrictions were in effect, but we sat around the fire ring anyway. The traditional campfire was replaced by one of the guys flashing around his blue headlamp like a strobe to unending commentary: "Welcome to CCCllub Lost Coast! Where the rrrrum is free and the dddogs are welcome!" Two things that definitely demarcated their generation from ours were that they got a kick out of the fact that Neil was sleeping in a tent between two girls (we should've played up the ménage à trois card), and that females were on the trail in the first place. Despite that, though, they were really warm and welcoming and funny. This last element might've been the product of the impressive array of alcohol that they'd packed in, but I think they were really more drunk on elation and camaraderie than on ethanol.

The last segment of our loop was the 3-mile, 3,000-foot elevation gain Buck Creek Trail. We'd had plenty of forewarning about its hellaciousness—first from an online description of the loop, next from the ranger, and finally from the Bug Juice Band—and so allotted all of Sunday to the climb. Neil tore off at an impossibly amazing pace, and our line was soon well-staggered (ha, ha), though he was really great and considerate about breaks.

As we reluctantly stood up from our second one, Molly proposed that we do something to get our minds off the hill. We played "Grandmother's Picnic," in which each person recites the previous list and then tacks on another thing that they're bringing to Grandmother's picnic, which occupied us pretty well 'til the next break. Next was a rendition of "99 Bottles of Beer" in which we took turns singing a verse with a different bottled beverage. Two distinct advantages over the traditional version are that you're breath-savingly not singing every verse, and that dreaming up a new drink for every time it's your turn keeps your mind off how much the climb sucks.

We cleared the top of the fogline somewhere around 53 bottles of Jack Daniels. Dried plum juice, mayonnaise, turpentine daiquiris, grape soda, and bird pond water, among other equally creative options, took us to a wall empty of bottles, at which point we took another water break. The trail leveled off at some point (we weren't very good estimators; it turned out to be the beginning of mile three), but then got steep enough again to start us on some rounds of "Boom chick-a-boom." Like before, we got some really strange variants going: underwater, hick, bear, stoned, Valley girl. We'd just gotten started on Jesse Jackson ("...and God will smite you with a BOOM chick-a-boom!") when a sign indicating the King Crest trail popped up in front of our faces, far faster than we'd expected. Hooray! Joy! Pictures! Celebratory manic depressive version: "I said, a boom chick-a-BOOMISAIDABOOM chick. A. Boom..."

After a brisk and shallow downhill-then-uphill, totaling not more than a mile, we spied the gate to the parking clearing. Even with our numerous and increasingly long breaks, the whole climb had taken us less than the ranger's four-hour estimate from start to finish. Oh, and then Neil went running again for 7 miles. When he came back, we drove down to Shelter Cove to return the bear canisters and for a big greasy late lunch before making record time back to the Bay Area.

I think I might be a little too hypnotized by the mind-numbing glare of my LCD screen to really make you feel how I felt on the trail with Molly and Neil this weekend. The paragraphs I've just written seem methodical, wooden, dead... and I hadn't laughed as much as I did with them for a long, long time. It was, simply put, a great weekend. We got up when we wanted, hiked 'til we just began to feel pangs of not wanting to go any further, had laughter-filled evenings, and went to bed with Not checking ahead for water sources was irresponsible and maybe even a little dangerous—I'm definitely not going to go on another trip without first firmly fixing water sources in my mind—then again, this had been a recommended route on the BLM website. The bushwhacking to Big Flat, though, was just pure fun. I guess that's the thing with backpacking and climbing and outdoor activities in general: safe danger, controllable thrill, planned unexpectedness, and all of those other oxymorons.