8/21/20 Day 107: Styles Peak (1661.0) to Bully Brook/White Rocks Recreation stealth site (1679.3)

Friday, August 21 7:29 pm 18.3 AT mi 18.7 total mi

AT 1661.0 Styles Peak → AT 1679.3 Bully Brook/White Rocks Recreation stealth site

Weather: Cool and sunny until 0.8 mi from Bully Brook, then storms with heavy rain. Glasses completely fogged up, completely wiped out and slid down the trail once, ended up off trail at parking lot unintentionally

Trail Conditions: Some great sections of trail, some sections with nasty blowdowns. Slipped off the side of the trail and took a nasty fall onto a twisted leg trying to avoid one – thankfully, pain went away after about a half mile of walking

My Condition: Now that I’m dry and warmed up, happy. Earlier, was cold and soaked to the bone and sore

Unintentionally split the party (NEVER split the party!!!). Blue and Hummingbird joined me at the stealth site by the parking lot after hearing there was a port-a-potty here, while Puddles camped at Bully Brook where we originally planned to camp. Feel bad about that! Bonded with HB over computer games, namely World of Warcraft. She started night elf druid but had a tauren warrior main character. My first was a tauren warrior, later an orc shaman main. Guess I’ll have someone to play with if I’m emotionally crippled by post trail depression!

Post Trail Analysis

I remember this particular fall being quite nasty. Getting hurt, having your hike ended by an injury, and dealing with an injury without insurance are all legitimate fears, and as I laid on the ground following this fall, I thought that this might actually be a hike-ender. I was scared to get back up, worried that the pain – located where it was – might be a broken fibula. I took some deep breaths to calm myself, took a minute to let the pain subside, and laboriously climbed back up onto my feet. My lower leg hurt something fierce, but you really do become a resilient, Terminator-like hiking machine out here. During her time on trail crew, Puddles fought a never-ending battle with cairns. She’d teach her crew to kick most of them over, because most of them shouldn’t be there. Cairns are meant to act as directional markers, particularly when you are above treeline and don’t have trees upon which to paint blazes. Today, I came across a cairn garden. It’s beautiful in a very eerie way, but knowing it’s what she’d want me to do, I gleefully kicked one over. This action must have brought some really bad juju, because within minutes dark stormclouds began to roll in. I didn’t have far left to go to get to Bully Brook, where we planned on spending the night. I bypassed the shelter, put my head down, and hiked, hoping to get to camp and have my tent set up before the weather hit. The weather hit before I got to the campsite. Heavy sheets of rain pelted me and the humidity skyrocketed – my glasses were fogged up and everything was too wet to effectively dry them off, I missed a double white blaze marking a sudden change in direction of the trail, and I continued hiking down the blue blazed side trail, slipping, sliding, and falling down what was quickly becoming a waterfall of a trail. I reached a parking lot, totally surprised at where I had ended up - this isn’t Bully Brook! Soaked and shivering, I set up my tent in a nice flat spot with good tree cover and did my best to wring the water from my discarded hiking clothes, and dry the inside of my tent, before changing into dry sleep clothes. Huddled under my quilt and devouring as much of my food bag as I could, I eventually stopped shivering. As much as Blue wanted to make fun of me for getting lost and wandering so far off trail, she said it would’ve been an easy mistake to make even in decent weather – the double white blaze was followed by a sharp right turn. Well after Blue and Hummingbird had arrived and getting past hiker midnight, we heard a car roll up to the parking lot near the campsite. Someone got out and started shouting our names. It was Jinx! He had gone in to town to see a doctor. After the trail, Hummingbird and I would indeed bond over our shared love of video games!

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