Day 12 – 7/12/18
~21 miles
Lake below Shout of Relief Pass to Red’s Meadow

It’s town day! We packed food for 7 days, but with only 21 miles (much of it on trail) remaining and a strong desire for lounging in mosquito free comfort, we decided to push for town now on day 5.

We had a couple more miles off trail past a bunch of lakes, very pretty in the morning stillness, and then down a deep valley to Tully Hole Meadow.

I take back everything I said previously about apocalyptic mosquitoes. Tully Hole is surely epicenter of mosquito hell.

The only redeeming characteristic of Tully Hole was that we joined a real trail to speed up our escape from the bloodsuckers. After a mile we joined the PCT and climbed up out of the creek, and finally the mosquitoes thinned.

We passed a ton of JMT hikers, recognizable by their tall hiking boots and 85L packs, stuffed to the gills. But one guy took the cake. Not only did he have the 100L backpack, but he had 2, yes 2, Bearvault 500’s (that’s the largest size bear canister you can get) stacked sideways, forming a wide cylinder across his chest strapped to the front of him, his arms resting on top of them! He must’ve custom made that carrying strap system himself, surely no one else has ever thought this was a good idea. When Dan greeted him with a cheerful, “How’s it going?” he just half nodded, panting. I didn’t get the impression he’d appreciate me taking his photo.

We left the PCT to go up a trail to Duck Lake. Steve Roper says to take the trail to Duck Pass then walk up the the crest route from there. Though a trail along the crest is shown in the base Topo maps, we didn’t think there was actually trail there, so we decided to “shortcut” and go cross country early up to the crest, essentially walking one leg of a triangle cross country instead of two legs of a triangle, one trail and one cross country. When we finally got to the crest, wouldn’t you know, there was actual trail there. Ha!

From the crest we could see storm clouds brewing to the west, all through the big peaks. It was still happy clouds and spots of sunshine where we were at, so we continued, but picked up our pace. The trail remained surprisingly good, dipping down to Deer Lakes and then continuing up along the ridge.

Just as we finally dropped down off the ridge the skies opened up and dumped chickpea sized hail on us for a couple of minutes. Thankfully the thunder and lightning never did get too close to us.

Once down we needed to walk through the forest a half mile north to hit a trail which would take us to Red’s Meadow. It seemed like it would be super easy, nice open forest walking. But then we hit a burn area and all the mess of downed trees that go with them, along with rocky fingers sticking up every which way. I got turned around and wasn’t heading north for a while. It felt like it took hours. It really wasn’t all that bad, but felt worse since we were so close to the end of our day and eager to be done.

We finally hit trail and cruised the last 2 miles to Red’s Meadow, where we picked up our resupply box and had the world’s most expensive ice cream bars before catching the bus to town. (And then another wait for another bus, etc etc)

We finally got into town and booked a 2 night stay at the Rodeway Inn, which I do not recommend. We should’ve spent the extra $10 for the Motel 6.

Zero day here we come!