weather improves

After a full rest day, we tried hitting out of Dubois. I made a poor call, thinking that if we go eat breakfast in the place where the locals hang out, we'll garner some sympathy for our qioxotic mission and one of the ranchers will give us a ride back to the trail. Didn't work. Reading the thoughts of the men and women dunking toast into coffee, I felt the big question to be "how do these adult men end up out here playing on a work day?"

The answer, unfortunately seemed to be that we'd executed some financial chicanery on hard working folks. Few smiles, curt nods, silence to my thank yours and beg your pardons. These folks have work to do.

Finally, we called a church group who let hikers sleep in the church, and a husband within earshot of the phone was happy to drive us out. Yes!

We started on a road past the little town of Dunair to avoid the section of trail where the man was attacked. Last year a CDT hiker was charged and she used up her bear spray to stop it. Same place! With the road walk we saved most of a day too, which was, I confess, nice!

Big views in all directions up around 10k feet. Suddenly, we came over a hill to find a guy named Tripod cooking hot spaghetti for hikers in the back of his truck. Six or seven of us enjoyed talking about trails and bears. I set off first, five miles to go. I'm not often alone these days and I like being alone sometimes. My focus ranges differently in those times.

Still, Cory and I had a great night, camping in a cow pasture which the cows didn't like much... They had to go around us to retreat to their beds for the night. A cigar and some whiskey Cory brought out, long conversation about the world and our lives in it.

Next day, we hiked up to Gunsight Pass, with a stunning view across to the Wind Rivers. Over the next hours we traversed this landscape and evening found us under Flattop Mountain, with technical routes on clean granite climbed by Beckey (I am honoured to have known him before he died) and Kor in 1961. Swede and Whitney, two older Swedish gentlemen, joined us at camp. They are pretty inspiring. Much faster hikers than us, they are also twenty years older! We'd see them over the next days. 

Uphill between walls of granite, we popped out on a high plateau by Summit Lake. After some lunch we wended our way down between a half dozen lakes under a hot sun. Way better than bad weather, though! A steep descent brought us to a camp below the Elkhart complex where we'd get a ride to pinedale the next day. Mosquitoes were terrible, so we ate in our tents, a bad idea in bear country, but we hadn't seen scat or sign in two days. Moreover, we are pretty likely to be safe over the southern Wind Rivers Range due to the number of hikers on the trunk trails. Additionally, the grizzlies should now be up high in remote meadows, gorging on berries to fatten up for winter.

After a steep climb in the morning, we got a lift down to pinedale to enjoy another zero day. We scrambled to ship a resupply box to South Pass City (not actually a city, just a remote store in the middle of nowhere), so we'll be able to slide into the desert without trying to make the difficult hitch into Lander.

I'm enjoying a beer, writing this up, clothes are clean and I've got nothing to do for a few hours. What luxury!