Utah started out well enough, a beautiful campsite with a gorgeous sunset our first night in the state, a motel room comped to us the third night, both scouted and obtained by Ky. While the day temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, they now felt twenty degrees cooler. One might think that going home for a wedding would be good news as well.
Ky brought us to Salt Lake City to fly back east for the first of two weddings we would be attending on Cindy’s side of the family. We arrived in New York City, where the temperature also reached 100 degrees while we were there, except that the much greater humidity made 100 degrees really feel like 100 degrees. We took public transit to the wedding being held in Westchester County, with an assist from our kids picking us up at the station. All told we spent a little more than a day back east and only took three days off the trail.
People occasionally cannot attend family weddings; one might think that hiking through the Great Basin desert on a year long journey might would be one such reason. The expense of leaving the trail to attend both weddings hurt our finances, having already spent down retirement savings to reboot our lives. Cindy did not want to go to these weddings despite them being on her side of the family; the decision to go was mine.
Why was I more motivated to attend? At our send off party one of Cindy’s siblings admonished that I better take care of her. Her family’s concern reflects what I discovered society as a whole feels. Hiking 5,000 miles with a loved one experiencing cognitive decline was crazy behavior. I hoped that showing up at these family weddings would appease their concerns.
During one conversation near the buffet table (where, as a long distance hiker, I spent much of my time), a few of her siblings reiterated their concerns. Cindy also was aware of their thoughts which, in hindsight, was probably the major reason why she did not want to attend. If only I had listened!
Our return to the trail found us leaving desert terrain and hiking over mountains. At first we were on dirt roads with no worries. In Beaver we stopped at a ranger station for a scouting report, to see if the trails through Fish Lake National Forest were like Nevada trails, poorly maintained at times to the point of nonexistence. The rangers informed us that the South Fork of South Creek route we would be taking had been cleared recently, but then I eavesdropped on a phone conversation where a ranger was telling someone about closed trails due to avalanches.
We hiked on cleared trail along the South Fork of South Creek as promised, experiencing 2.5 miles of pleasant ascending, simply placing one foot in front of the other. We made camp just before the pass. The next day, on the other side of the pass, we descended somewhere along the Old Government Trail. I say “somewhere along” because four miles of intermittent blowdowns littered the actual trail, exhausting us by the time we reached the other side.
Just as a wet year created 15’ minimum June snowpacks in California, and summer flooding of Nevada deserts, Utah achieved 600 percent of normal snowpack. This anomalous year replenished previously depleted aquifers in the state, but for us meant an abundance of blowdowns from avalanches that a trail crew may or may not reach before us. Unlike Nevada, where trail conditions were due to lack of maintenance, I could not complain about what fate dealt us. As usual, Cindy never complained about the hiking either, though she was not as chipper as she had been in California and Nevada.
