Coming full circle on the high divide -day 6 hiking out

 

Day 6 Barnes Creek Trail to Crescent lake
3 miles 1,100 feet elevation loss



Banana slugs making the Ying and Yang symbol

We had a bus to catch at 10:20, the bus stop was three miles down the trail.  I did not want to take any chances of missing the bus, there is only one connection each day that will get us home from Crescent Lake. 

I got up at 5:30 and had a relaxed cup of coffee before I woke up my daughter and served breakfast.  Breakfast was a dinner that we had left over.  All of our actual lunch and breakfast food had already been eaten. 

We left our lovely little camp site at 7am and began to hike down.  The trail immediately lost 1,100 feet in elevation and deposited us on the banks of Barnes Creek where the trail goes up and down.    There are several bridges on the trail, two had rotten hand rails but the actual bridges were solid.

Long brigde on Barnes Creek Trail



Rotten Bolete



Tunnel to the other side

 

We made it down to the 8 foot wide trail that parallels the highway at about 9am. We went through the tunnel under the road and crossed over into the human world. We found the bathrooms and I was in awe of soap. Wonderful soap. I had been six days without soap. We cleaned up a bit for our bus ride home and then we began to look for the bus stop.

I did not like walking down the side of the highway looking for the bus stop as logging trucks roared past.  I was happy to find that the bus stop had a rustic bench.  We were both tired and hungry, we had over did it the day before.  I had one package of M&M's left, I produced it at the bus stop and we shared it.



Our bus stop and our ULA Circuit packs.

Kid sized pack on left and adult small on right.

My garcia bear can, our tarptent and my sleeping bag

fit in my pack the last  two days because I was able

to stuff all of my clothes into the mostly empty bear can.

Soon a Clallam transit bus stopped on the other side of the  highway and dropped of 25 school children with two adults.  All the children rushed into the woods and disappeared and the bus left.  Wait?  Did that even happen?  All was silent again.  There was no proof that that had even happened.

Then suddenly all the kids appeared on our side of the road!  There was another tunnel under the road that the kids had taken to get to our side. 

Then one of the adults came towards us, she said they were a summer school class and they could not take kids across the highway so they had to ride the bus to the tunnel take them under the road and then catch a bus back in the other direction to their destination at Fishers bluff.

  Yep, you guessed it those 25 school children got on the bus with us and here I thought that this was a desolate bus stop in the middle of nowhere.  I guess it was a gentle enough re-entry, the children were all very nice.


Callam transit drops off 25 young children across the highway

We were hungry and we did not have a lay over at our first transfer in Port Angeles.  We had to wait until we got off our second bus in Sequim before we could eat.

Changing buses in Port Angeles

Pack on Clallam Transit luggage rack

In Sequim we had fried chicken to go.  It cost $2.50 for one breast but it was so good, it was worth it.



Lunch

 We also had a short layover in Port Towsend so we popped into Safeway and bought some food.  I like that the Jefferson Transit center is next to a large grocery store!

Jefferson Transit Center

 I met a bunch of interesting people on our bus rides including a man from Neah Bay who was commuting to Seattle by bus, his spouse was also terminally ill with the same illness and could not drive him around.  His spouse had even lost her job the same month that my spouse lost his job.

On the final ride home  I met two people from Olympia who had huge backpacks and had been in the San Jaun islands playing music, they too were looking forward to going home and taking showers.  We talked about mushrooms and wine making.   I bet they were Greeners.

We got home at 4:15 and my spouse was waiting for us on the front porch.