Friday, September 20, 2013

Day 5: Spruce Ledge Camp to Corliss Camp

I woke up feeling cheery, and started a dry southerly climb to the twin summits of Bowen mountain. This was a big day for me -- I made it almost 7 miles in around 5 hours. Breaking the 1 m.p.h. barrier!







Between the northern and southern summits of the mountain was a nice, easy saddle. I stopped for a proper lunch break, scoffed snacks and sent texts to loved ones. 


I thought this rock looked like mountains and sky. Evidently, I take any excuse for a photo break.
Wish I knew more about mushrooms. There are lots. 





I  leapfrog the school group from last night a few times -- they're also heading to Corliss Camp. I get to the camp sooner than I'd thought, and pitch up jumbo tent in a clearing. 


I sleep perpendicular across the tent to avoid hard knobbly roots. I probably touch the sides of the tent in doing so -- it rains hard overnight and I have puddles by my head and toes in the morning. 

The taxi driver who dropped me to the northern trailhead said "with you being a musician, maybe the trail will give you some great ideas for new songs!" So far, inching along the trail itself with my almost-unbearable backpack has consumed almost all my energy. For the first few days, the deepest philosophical thought I had was "Mud: It's Slidy". My brain played a mosaic-like monkey jukebox of song snippets culled from recent gigs, and various verses or lyrical lines by Skindred, Sleater-Kinney ('The Professional' has been my trudging-uphill song for years now), Veruca Salt, The Beatles (for the lyrics "you're gonna carry that weight... a long time") and Warrior Soul (for the lyrics "It's so frightening, carry a heavy load / Hits like lightning that's just the way it goes"). The jukebox skipped from one verse or phrase to a different song as I hopped over boulders in the gulch, never playing through a whole song or even a whole chorus. A whopping 16 beats of a new hair-metal anthem -- provisionally entitled "In the Very Gulch of the Devil", and highly derivative of "Shout at the Devil" with additional squealiness on the guitar -- swirled around the jukebox as I stumbled up toward Spruce Ledge Camp, and on the next day towards Corliss. That, and the zipper piece, are all I've written so far. Brains are weird.  

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