My Journey to Freedom and Ultralight Backpacking Read Free Page B

season was permitted, keeping the wildlife skittish. We averaged 14 miles a day. Later that first week, though, a sudden thunderstorm kept us pinned down under the shelter of a stand of tall pines for a couple hours. We hiked a modest 13 miles, but were satisfied just to be alive.
      I learned so much. Rainmaker would give lessons periodically on maps and navigation: how to decipher topography maps, coordinate them with the guide book, and then take readings with the compass set with the proper declination. The ability to match the blue contour lines in the book with the mountains surrounding us on the trail seemed to be a magical gift. One day, I hoped to possess it.
      Another day we hiked for over an hour on a narrow, loose, rocky ledge along a mountain ridge 1000 feet above Blue Lake. The gale force winds made it very difficult to breath, much less make progress. We both managed to keep our hats, which were tightly cinched with chin cords sewn on before leaving home.
      Let nobody tell you it’s summer there. I wore all the clothes I brought just about every night. I slept in a 20-degree synthetic bag. Rainmaker wore thermal underwear, a balaclava, fleece hat, and rain parka. We sat in our sleeping bags while cooking outside.
      Each morning we woke about 6 a.m. and cooked our breakfasts, each on our own stove. By 7:30 we were packed and on the trail. After a couple hours hiking we took a snack break. Then, around noon we would stop for an hour lunch break. Three hours after resuming, we would take an afternoon snack break. By 5 pm we were looking for a campsite large enough for our tent, preferably with water close by. The Lakota was light, but it required a lengthy tent site. It measured, with its vestibules on either end, 12 feet long and 5 feet wide. We could sit up in it, and enter and exit without climbing over each other. Rainmaker had a tent zipper fail in the High Sierra the previous year, so he requested that for this new tent we use Velcro closures. The amount of Velcro on that first tent I made was incredible. There was over 30 feet of both hook and loop strips. It was my first experience sewing with silnylon, and a bigger project than I anticipated. Both front and back screen doors, and front and back silnylon storm doors had Velcro on the vertical sides. If the hook strips would contact the screen, it was very difficult to remove without ripping the screen. If a portion of the front Velcro became attached to some portion of the back door Velcro, once stuffed into its storage sack, it became a bundle of confusion. The entire tent was gray, which made it was very hard to tell the floor from the canopy when the Velcro was all tangled. To rectify this technical problem I learned that when taking it down in the mornings, all of the Velcro had to be completely matched in its proper position in order to identify its parts when pulling it from its stuff sack in the evenings.
       The first week nearly over, our food bags almost empty, we happily hiked into Echo Lake Resort. From there we hitched into South Lake Tahoe. This would be my first resupply ever. I had no idea then how unusual it was to have such a large town for our convenience.     Resupplying for 106 miles is quite an endeavor. We estimated it would take 8 days on the trail. Cooking separately was much easier for us than trying to negotiate what to have for meals and snacks. This section I opted for SUGAR! Last section I had mixed nuts, granola, and beef jerky, all high fat, but low sugar. All the things the books say you need. This time I gave into complex and simple carbohydrates. It seemed that’s what my body craved.
    The following directions I wrote in my journal on how to resupply food:
1. Find a decent grocery store and/or a Big K.
2. Buy everything you’re craving, think you might crave, looks good and is cheap.
3. Carry it “home”.
4. Dump onto your bed all food leftover from last week’s section.
5. Dump all the food you