After a huge breakfast at the VVR restaurant, omelets and potatoes, we picked up our resupply buckets from the resort staff. A week before we left Washington, we mailed two 5 gallon buckets of food to the resort that contained our second week’s supply of food. We spent the morning evaluating what we’d eaten the previous week and how we could possibly pare down our food to make our packs a bit lighter. We ended up leaving behind a couple pounds of food each and just managed to cram what we needed into our bear-proof food canisters.
While we were sorting our food the water taxi dropped off another load of hikers. One of them was a man named Larry from Virginia who we spent the afternoon chatting to and we discovered that we both had the intention of summiting Mt. Whitney the morning of September 14th. Larry had started his hike in South Lake Tahoe (about a hundred miles north of Yosemite) and was doing all 300+ miles by himself, but had made plans to meet his son on the summit of Mt. Whitney. We also discovered that he had passed “New York” on the trail the day before and it sounded like he wasn’t doing any better than when we left him at Duck Creek. Larry even suggested to the VVR owner that they may want to muster Search and Rescue for this guy as he appeared to be in a great deal of pain and moving at a snail’s pace. I don’t think they did and I’m sure New York eventually made it to VVR under his own power and caught his shuttle to the Fresno airport (we hope!) but it really drove home the point that a thing like the JMT can attract all kinds of people. In any event, Larry was a great guy and we dug his story and his vibe so we hoped we’d run into him along the trail again.
I was starting to feel better and after some time online using the resort’s computer, we figured that somehow I had picked up some kind of food poisoning, how exactly we didn’t have a clue, but from what we read, we figured the symptoms should subside in a couple more days and I should kick it without needing antibiotics or a doctor. Vermillion was a place that we could pull the plug on the trip, but it wouldn’t have been easy…it would’ve involved hitchhiking to Fresno and from there catching a Greyhound or YARTS bus back over to the east side of the Sierras and then hitchhiking up to Whitney Portal. We decided to catch the afternoon ferry and just hike the one and a half miles back up to the Muir trail junction and spend the night…if I felt like garbage the next day, we could still hike back to the water taxi and begin the west side exit, but we hoped I’d be well enough to continue.
We did check the NOAA forecasts while at the resort and the weather looked like it was going to be changing in a couple days…rain, snow, and very cold temperatures were on the way for later in the week, but would hopefully only last a day or two.
time to repack the bear bins!
back on the boat, returning to life on the trail
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