Day 8- Silver Pass and Bear Ridge

 Tuesday, June 24

"Tired puppies drag their tails. Tired hikers drag their hiking poles."

Beginning: Fish Creek (Mile 78.7)
Ending: Bear Ridge (Mile 93)
Daily recorded distance: 16.7 miles
Total recorded distance: 105.6 miles
Daily recorded elevation gain: 4,081 feet
Total recorded elevation gain: 25,105 feet

Today was mostly uneventful, but it was hard. Looking back, it was the hardest day of the whole hike. In the first four miles, we climbed two thousand feet to the top of Silver Pass (10,754 feet). The climb was strenuous, but no harder than our earlier climb to the top of Donohue. The last fifty yards to the top was covered in snow, but we managed to cross without slipping or postholing. On the long descent to Edison Lake, we hiked with two southbound hikers for a short way. One was just out to see how far he could get in two days of hiking, and the other was hiking at a slow pace. He had started several days before us, and now he was trying to get to Vermilion Valley Resort before his knee gave out on him. After hiking eleven miles, we were hiking along a nice creek close to Edison Lake that had several nice camp sites along it. From there, we could have taken a ferry across the lake to VVR where we would have had hot showers and real food. We never planned on stopping there, so we decided to keep going even though it was getting late. We had been going downhill since the top of the pass, and our legs felt good so we thought we could make it another five miles to the next good creek marked on the map. Unfortunately, we did not realize that another climb, as big as the pass we had climbed in the morning, lay between us and that creek. We started climbing to the top of Bear Ridge. Then we kept climbing, and then we kept climbing some more. That climb, coming unexpectedly at the end of the day, felt harder to me than anything else on the trail. And there wasn't even any view at the top. The entire Bear Ridge is covered in thick pine forest that doesn't leave any way to see the view surrounding the ridge. They should cut down all the trees. Except for the junipers. Some gnarly big junipers were growing along the northern slope. They looked like sequoias that didn't quite grow up. As we neared the top, the climb began to level out, but we weren't finding any place to camp. We needed water, and the top of the ridge was bone dry. Footsore and weary, we continued on hoping we would find a place to camp on the way down. The descent from the ridge was steep, but there were small places for tents scattered along the trail. They already had tents so we kept going. Finally, we found a small flat area right beside the trail with only one tent on it. Bryce (northbound PCT, from Texas) invited us to set up camp with him so we set up in a small campsite between the trail and a steep drop off.  We had access to a small trickle of water. Soon a group of northbound PCTers added their tents to the collection, and we spent the night in an impromptu PCT village.

The nice creek we could have camped by.