Some trips take months of planning. This one I planned in a gas station parking lot because the inversion forecast looked perfect and my laundry could wait.
An inversion, if you have never chased one, is when the valley fills with cloud and the ridges float above it like islands. You climb through cold gray soup for three hours and then step out of the top of it into sunshine. It is the closest thing hiking has to a magic trick.
DAY 1The climb was switchbacks and false summits, four of them, each one rude in its own way. I broke out of the cloud deck at about five thousand feet and stopped counting complaints. Up there the wind was the only sound. Camp went in on a flat spur at sixty four hundred with a whole sea of cloud below me turning orange.
I stayed high all day, walking island to island along the ridge. The wind never quit and the temperature never cleared the low forties, which is fire practice weather. The lunch fire took six strikes off the ferro rod in a wind I had to block with my whole body. I timed it because I time things. Eleven minutes from first strike to hot tea.
The casualty of the trip was a bargain dry bag I had on trial. Split at the seam by day two, which is exactly why it was on trial and not in the shop. My clothes rode the rest of the way in the pack liner and the lesson rode home for free.
Frost on the fly by four in the morning, twenty eight degrees at the coldest, and the bag held the line again. The lantern ran all three nights on its low setting on one charge. That is the most boring sentence I write in this journal, and it is also the reason the thing gets to stay in the shop.
DAY 3I dropped back into the cloud on the way out and the magic trick ran in reverse, sunshine to gray soup in about two hundred vertical feet. The car had frost on it. The gas station coffee tasted like victory and burnt toast. Three days, twenty six miles, one dead dry bag, and a camera roll I still have not gotten over.
