Today would be my longest day. About eight miles, which is about as long as any of my segments, and the most difficult terrain. The first half is pretty much all up hill in varying degrees of steepness including the climb to the summit of the pass which was by far the steepest.
It rained quite a bit the previous nite. My bivi-bag got a bit soaked, which made it easy for me to decide to get up plenty early in the morning. I was in the warming shelter at about 6:30, but there were already a lot of people up before me. There were even a couple of groups who had started out on the trail long before I got up. I stayed in the shelter quite awhile hoping my shoes would dry out a bit more and that the rain would let up. The rain finally did mostly stop, and I left about 8:45.
The trip to the summit wasn't as bad as I thought it might have been. There were a few spots that were difficult to get across with out having soaked feet, and it was pretty much a constnt incline, but other than that it wasn't too bad. I think that hiking on the mountains around Sitka gave me an advantage over many of the hikers. I was already having a tendency to hike quicker than most of the groups on the trail, and I think it may have been even a little more pronounced going up the hills.
On the way up the long hill before the steeper rise to the summit, I had a little mishap. I had just passed some people and then I stopped to take a picture. While I was starting to put my camera away they caught up with me. I didn't want to have to play leap frog, so I figured I would start walking while putting my camera away and stay ahead of them. Unfortunately the terrain we were on wasn't too good for such a plan. It was mostly large damp rocks, and so while stepping around one, I slipped and fell, gashing my arm and stubbing my toe. Fortunately I managed to old on to the camera and it only got a little banged up. After picking myself up, I rested for a little while in order to give my body a chance to calm itself back down after the adrenaline rush. I rinsed the gash a little and let it bleed itself out. It didn't really bother me much while I was hiking. The toe was more bothersome. It wasn't really painful, but I knew that it was there, and so I tried to take it fairly easy on it so I didn't make anything worse.
The Scales is the name of the place near the beginning of where the climb steepens to the summit. It is called that because that is where many packers would stop and renegotiate their wages and the goldrushers would take things out of their packs to keep the weight down as much as possible. There is still a lot of junk sitting around up there. When I got to The Scales I was already in the clouds. There were markers in the snow and rocks going up to the summit and I could rarely see more than one or two markers ahead of me. It was a bit windy as well; as I went along, the wind kept blowing clouds by me.
I was surprised to find that there were a couple of false summits. While it was nice to have a couple of more level places to walk, it can be a little disheartening to think that you are at the top only to find that, no, you still have quite a ways to go. When I finally got to the summit, I changed in to a dry shirt and ate some lunch in the warming shelter while talking with the many other people who came or went while I while I was there.
It didn't take to long coming down the other side to get below the clouds. There was a nice bit of hill covered with snow, that some people apparently sledded down. That probably would have been nice, except that it probably would have been a bit wet. There was a lot of snow melt on this side of the pass and there was a place where I decided to just take off my shoes and socks and where sandles and walk through the streams running across the trail. They were too wide to jump, and I wanted to keep my footwear as dry as possible.
I got to Happy Camp about six hours after I started. It was indeed happy, particularly since the sun came out for awhile for the first time the whole hike. I was finally able to get most of my gear (including my bivi) dry.
There were some cute young birds around the warming shelter in camp. They were old enough to fly, but were still being fed by their parents. One of them decided to sit on one of the backpacks sitting around on the porch and so a couple of us took some pictures of it. It let us get quite close. There was also a robin nesting in a tree next to one of the outhouses. These were to be pretty much my most impressive encounters with wildlife the whole trip.