Day 55 – 5/7/16
9.4 map / (in a tight canyon, inaccurate and disregarding) GPS miles
825.9 / 898.8 miles total

What a day. Of course, it snowed overnight, an inch or two on the ground and a very wet heavy layer of snow coating our tents. Not much choice but to pack up and walk in the misty dripping rain. Plunge pool day, huh?

After ~4 miles the road walking ended and we descended a short bit of single track to Mauv Saddle where we were shocked to find the “cabin” on the map to be a beautiful historic ranger cabin, and even more shocking, unlocked!

Naturally we went inside to catch a break from the rain. But now what to do? The forecast for tomorrow didn’t look much better than today, around “50% chance of thunderstorms”, which out here seems to mean “100% chance of rain all day”. If we left we would be cold walking in the rain, but at least we’d drop significant elevation and get to warmer temps.

Shortly after our arrival, fellow Hayduker Doobie rolled in. We’ve been leapfrogging with him for the past week or so. He clearly was psyched out about the upcoming plunge pools as well and glad to catch up with us to not be alone through this section.

After much debate, around noon the cloud we were sitting in cleared enough that we could see the hillside next to the cabin, and we decided to make a break for it.

There was no camping to be had between the cabin and the end of Saddle Canyon, 4.5 miles away. That doesn’t sound far, but we knew from past hikers this section was notoriously slow. Eight hours of daylight left, no problem, right?

The first couple miles were a simple bushwhack down the drainage into the canyon. The brush was thorny and wet and the rain flared back up again several times, but overall it wasn’t bad. Bubs even found 2 morels to add to her dinner!

Then we got to one of the impassable pouroffs, a straight shoot dropping down about 15 feet. Doobie arrived at it first and when we showed up he asked us to lower his pack down by rope after he went down. Before we really assessed the situation, he was down the pouroff. We lowered his pack down to him and then he went on around the corner, only to report the next drop off was worse.

Then came the “ah-ha” moment when I asked myself, “would Wired do this?” The answer was a resounding “Hell no.” I immediately started backtracking, scouting for a bypass route. Sure enough, a hundred yards back, a large cairn marked an escape up the side of the canyon.

Doobie somehow climbed back up the pouroff and we hauled his pack back up, no easy task as that thing seriously weighs at least 60lbs. The bypass route itself was somewhat sketchy, a bunch of crumbling rock and loose dirt heading way up high and coming down a side drainage before rejoining the canyon.

Then we finally got to what we thought were the plunge pools, places where water collects in the slick rock and you are funneled down directly into the frigid standing water. They didn’t actually look so bad, and we were fortunately in a sunny spell, so it was pretty warm. We had great fun taking photos as we waded through the first couple of pools. After those came many more pools, but we were able to bypass around most of them.

Again Doobie got ahead of us and came hiking back towards us without his pack, looking for a bypass cairn, reporting there was a pouroff plunge pool ahead that was a no go. This whole saga turned into an hour plus of us scouting for a bypass, including me witnessing Doobie nearly die as a narrow ledge he walked out on crumbled beneath him, a sheer 40′ drop to the canyon floor below. I don’t know how he hung on and got back up.

In the end, we went through those plunge pools and it wasn’t so bad, but by then it was raining again and late and we got very cold. Had we known these were the plunge pools, we’d have just gone through right away and it wouldn’t have been such an ordeal.

We finally got out of Saddle canyon around 7:30pm, a full 7 hours after we’d started the 4.5 mile stretch. There was no real place to camp, but we set up our wet tents in the rain on some flat enough ground in the brush no called it a night.

Secretly, I kinda loved it all.