Our last day on trail consisted of a beautiful bit of trail angling slowly down a ridge with gorgeous views of snow peaks to the left and no mosquitoes due to the previous night's storm. We flew into Reds Meadows without even using our poles. Once there, we hopped on the first bus into Mammoth. While on the bus, Boom booked us a motel, and I started panicking about all the work I needed to catch up on. Volume Three is going to print this month, and going to print requires lots and lots of edits and careful read-through. Shout out to Jen, my favorite co-worker ever who is carrying the company on her shoulders while I sweat in the woods every day.
Before getting to work, we headed to the local brewery to meet the rest of the members of Slow Magic, who had arrived about 24 hours previous. It was such a relief to see everyone; I had missed them a lot although we had plenty of fun on our own and created a really great dynamic with our smaller group and got to know more hikers as well. We swapped stories over beers until a few hours had passed, and I returned to the good old Motel 6 to get to work while Genie and Boom took care of all trail-related errands, including laundry, grocery shopping, drying rain-soaked gear, and feeding me. This continued the next day until check out, and we hopped back on the bus to return to Reds Meadow, this time determined to catch our crew who had left that morning.
By the time we got to the trail I felt completely drained from hours of focused Catalyst work and a few quick phone calls. After ten hard days on trail, we had been in town less than 24 hours, and it was anything but restful. We have another long, hard section ahead of us as we make our way to Tahoe. After this it should be smooth sailing into Northern California.
Somehow, we have been hiking for three months; in other words, we are halfway there time-wise (and a third of the way there distance-wise). Until now, I've been sure that at some point I would know that I had reached my limit. Now I'm almost more scared that I'm actually capable of finishing, which means spending the next three months hiking the remaining 1700 miles. This means we will have fewer breaks and long, long days in order to make our way to Canada.