July 4th Backpacking | Views from the Rain Shadow

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For this year’s 4th of July celebration, my wife and I took a COVID-19 backpacking getaway, my first backpacking trip in about 500 years. I’ve gone day hiking numerous times in exotic places such as the Yorkshire Dales in England, the South of France, Costco. Backpacking these days is way too high-tech and expensive for Olde codgers like me. I mean, first you spend thousands of dollars on “equipment” that you don’t know how to use, then you strap the equivalent of an armoire onto your back, and you climb thousands of feet over tens of miles to eat odd, dried food, shiver all night long with several rocks poking you in the back, and then you start to smell like the Port Townsend paper mill. There’s running water but you can’t drink it. It’s got something called halitosis that rodents put into the lakes and streams so they can giggle insanely while they watch hikers run for the trees to deal with the backpacker’s version of Montezuma’s Revenge.

For days after I get home I can’t walk and yet I’ve got to go to the bathroom every hour. I sound like a breakfast cereal when I try to move. My feet and back ache. I look at my Jack Russell to try to get sympathy, but he’s comatose from taking 2.5 times as many steps as I did on our lovely “outing.” I ask myself, “Why did I do this?”

We got a stove called a “Jetboil.” This thing is frightening. It splits atoms and disintegrates water in seconds and has the potential to burn all the hair off your arms (I know this personally, since it happened the first time I used it) and melt your tent and sleeping bag, leaving you to freeze to death and become a bear popsicle. It’s a far cry from the wimpy Bluet propane-like thing I used in the 70s. It seems to be the same type of stove as it has a little propaney-like canister, but now it’s attached to a Saturn V rocket engine, capable of incinerating small sections of the forest.

I got a new backpack for my COVID-19 hiking. It’s very compact; doesn’t have any pockets; seems to hold the equivalent of a large ziploc bag; yet, when I put all my “stuff” in it, the pack weighs as much as my SUV. I had a backpack with loads of exterior pockets. I LOVED having all those different pockets that I could use to organize my trail life. I could find a single bandaid in a fraction of a second. Now, with this new backpack, I’m lucky to find my sleeping bag or tent before daybreak. I can hear mountain goats and bears sniggering in the woods across the alpine meadow. “Did you see that Billy?!?! He’s thrown everything on the ground looking for his flashlight!!” “Aw ma gawd, Fozzy!! He’ll be nothing but a skeleton by midnight from all those skeeters! He’ll never get his tent up in time. And I was REALLY looking forward to sniffing around the edge of his tent.”

We have to use bear canisters in the backcountry now. That’s a change from the old days. I got used to sharing my granola with mice and chipmunks. That didn’t bother me. What upset me was they would chew a hole in my backpack to get to the granola. I became like Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail of backpacking supplies strewn for miles along the trail as they slipped out the rodent escape hatch.

I never worried about bears before. Mountain goats, yes. They would walk through camp at all hours sniffing at things to see if you had something salty for them. I woke one morning in Royal Basin staring up at the stinky-breathed face of a goat. The bears we saw were never closer than a half-mile away. Nonetheless, we would sometimes toss our food sack into a tree, mostly to entertain ourselves.

These bear canisters are quite the engineering feat. Very hard plastic with a lid that requires opposable thumbs that can exert 2 million foot-pounds of pressure. No bear — or human — can break into one of these. Including me. So I don’t close the lid all the way. Otherwise, I’d starve, the bears would have a carcass to feed on, and the whole point of protecting bears from eating fatty foods that lead to high cholesterol and bear heart disease would be moot.

Wishing you peace and happiness.