I smell like a meat pie. More specifically, a beef pasty with seasoned aromatics like rosemary and shallots. A real treat, until you realize the smell is emanating from my armpits. Quite the bouquet. Interestingly, although all of us in our hiking party are nauseated by our own smells, none of us can smell each other. My theory is that our own Pig Pen stink lines are so dense that no other smells can penetrate, and we are all left to languish hideously in our self-made clouds of horror. Toasty claims he smells of a rancid pile of overripe lemons. Little Brother says he spends the day awash in the charming aroma of a week-old unwashed pubescent boy’s hockey uniform. Dumptruck, ever the unique flower, describes his stench as “not unlike an attic; a pile of old books and discarded memories.” Leave it to Dumptruck to wax poetic about his butt stank.

Little Brother officially has a trail name! On the second day out from Stevens Pass, it began pouring rain just as we were setting up our tents. The four of us had hiked a little over 14 miles, and were utterly exhausted, our bones creaking with the groans of 10,000 old men begging for the sweet release of death. Accordingly, our tents were set up with distinctly less care than usual, rain flies half-heartedly tugged down as water poured buckets down the backs of our pants. In the morning, Little Brother emerged and announced that the entire inside of his tent had filled with water, soaking both himself and all of his gear. I declared that his tent had become a boat. He corrected me to say it was a sunken boat. His trail name is now Argonaut. It also fits because he is a lifeguard trainer, an avid swimmer, we grew up with a dad in the Coast Guard, and we’re Greek. Also, Argonaut is a heroic adventurer who makes a lot of screeching sounds, so it all works quite nicely. We call him Argie for short.

Argie has also coined a name for our group. As we are doing monumentally fewer miles a day than most all other hikers we’ve met, and we don’t start hiking until around 9:30am every day (whereas everyone else is up and out by 5am), we’re lovingly referring to ourselves as The Sloth Squad. Our motto, instead of “Live Fast, Die Young,” is “Live Slow, Die Whenever.” I love it.

The 4 of us have spent the past 7 days getting from Stevens Pass to Snoqualmie, another tiny mountain ski town. Although we hadn’t seen him in a week, we leap-frogged again with Barefoot Nick for the first few days, his mystical form materializing at the foot of the mountain just before we began hiking on the first day. On the second day, which had been relentlessly overcast and drizzly, he found us sprawled out on the side of the trail, stretching and wheezing. He stood in a small creek, unbothered as ice cold water ebbed over his dusty toes. I don’t know what posessed me, but I suddenly asked him if he liked his trail name. He shrugged and said,

“Not really, people just started calling me that.”

We then immediately began brainstorming names. Dumptruck offered the name Funny Hat, because he doesn’t even wear a hat, and it would confuse the heck out of people. He said his Mom used to call him Noon, and I identified that every time we see him it’s always around noon. Noon also feels nice, as it’s calming and reliable, and in lowercase all the letters are the same height. He looked up thoughtfully into the trees, the water burbling quietly over his feet, and said “Hm. Noon feels right.” At that exact moment the sun broke through the haze of mist and rain that had been shadowing the mountains all day, and shone a glittering beam of sunlight down onto him. He blinked up into the light, a little smile dancing around his fae-like face.

“Look,” Noon murmured, gesturing up the hill, “blueberries.” Dumptruck sprang to his feet and scampered up the hill, collecting several handfuls. As Dumptruck tipped blueberries into each of our cupped, outstretched hands, Noon thanked us for being with him when he found his name, and said he’d probably see us tomorrow. We did see find him the next day. For a few moments. Right at about noon.

Much of this section has wound us across gigantic rock screes, the trail a vague hint winding up across sheer cliff-faces of inside-out mountains. None of us slipped, but I did have occasion to feel grateful that I don’t have a fear of heights, especially when the rocks would shift and tumble threateningly under my shoes. We’ve been using an app called FarOut for navigation, and hikers can leave comments for things like whether water crossings have dried up, or if campsites are viable. It has been very helpful in a practical way, but also enlightening regarding the experiences looming ahead. This particular comment has been my favorite so far:

One day for lunch, after seeing Mount Rainier peaking up in the distance behind the craggy ridge line of a stegasaurus’ back, we sat by a perfectly clear snowmelt lake. I watched a neighborhood of pikas scampering about the rocks on the far side of the lake, their fuzzy tail-less rumps disappearing into crevices after meep-ing at each other with the drama of an HOA meeting. Tiny blue-capped birds dipped and skimmed across the surface of the water, the tips of their wings sending ripples of air across the smooth glass of its surface. A community of fluffy bees bumbled lazily about a patch of lupins, taking occasion to also land on Toaty’s hat to investigate the salt crystals that had formed there from his relentless sweat. These are the kinds of places where a stale tortilla wrapped around tuna from a packet tastes somehow like the most decadent meal you’ve ever had.

One evening we got to our tent site much earlier than expected, and set up by an absolutely crystal clear river. Lima Creek used to have quite the impressive bridge, judging by the bits of it still remaining, though the bridge itself was nowhere to be seen, having been ripped from its struts and carried off on its own adventure by the power of the river’s spring thaw. I only had the resilience to ice my feet and calves, the water bitingly, shockingly cold. Meanwhile, Argonaut continued to earn his trail name by taking an (intentional) ice bath, stripping down to his boxers and fully submerging himself up to his shoulders in the frigid river for half an hour.

After our 14 mile day we realized that we really did need to drop down to 11 miles a day at most, which meant that though we had planned to do this section in 6 days, it was going to take us 7 instead. On the 5th day, Toasty, Dumptruck and I peered into our food bags, the lack of sustenance therein staring ominously back up at us. This wouldn’t be so scary, except that Dumptruck’s Hiker Hunger has kicked in, meaning his metabolism has shot to the moon and his already very slender body is devouring itself. Lucky for us, Argonaut produced out of thin air a 2lb bag of couscous, which he graciously shared with us. It was immensely appreciated, but Toasty did immediately spill about half a cup of it directly into the dirt. We all stared at the pile of un-rescue-able dry couscous for a moment before breaking into hysterical laughter. We held a funeral for the thousands of tiny lost calorie souls, as Toasty dug an appropriately deep hole and buried it all away from camp. Listen, none of us are above eating food out of the dirt, but uncooked couscous was unrecoverable without the ratio of dirt to food being at least 4 to 1. Even us dirtbags have our limit.

Delightedly, we have found Laura again, the absolutely marvelous human we’d met just before Stehekin. We shared the best hug, and got to camp together on the 6th night, and hike into town as a team on the 7th day. Laura shared some of her extra food with the cavernous void that is Dumptruck. We fantasized about our favorite meals, dodged the relentless stream of clean-smelling day hikers coming up out of Snoqualmie, and all got to witness me accidentally kick my sleeping bag in its stuff sack down the side of a mountain. We watched with open mouths as it joyfully sailed away, bouncing down the embankment to a freedom never before afforded to a stuff sack. Luckily it only tumbled about 20 feet down before being suddenly halted by a tree, and I was able to, in quite an ungainly fashion, slide down to it on my butt, retrieve it, and scrabble back up to the trail.

As a side note, I’ve had Powerline’s i2i (from 1995’s A Goofy Movie) stuck in my head literally every day on this trail, largely because it’s extremely motivating and makes me happy. However, I didn’t have it on my iPod and every time we’ve been in town I’ve forgotten to download it. Halfway through this section we miraculously got one bar of cell service on the peak of Cathedral Mountain. We all had a wonderful phone call with Scope on speaker, and I was able to get just enough service to download i2i, which we then all danced our butts off to on the side of the mountain. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a song stuck in your head for 3 weeks before you can finally listen to it, but let me tell you, the relief is exquisite. We’ve now been starting our days with different pump-up songs, and thus far it’s been Disney bangers. Nothing helps me shake off the horrifying dampness of putting on a shirt soaked in 7 days worth of grime and sweat quite like punching the air to “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” or “Zero to Hero.” Please feel free to leave pump-up song ideas in the comments, I will absolutely take any/all suggestions.

Last night we got to share a beer with Laura and play Yahtzee at Dru Bru, the charming brewery in this little mountain town. Today, Argie’s childhood friend Jake and his partner Amber (who live about 2 hours from here) are here to spend the day with us and have offered kindly to shuttle us around for any errands we need. We’re heading back out into the wilderness tomorrow for another 100 mile section, and we’ll be shaking our sloth tooshies the whole way.

Love,

Thresher