Walks with Moss: Mount Lincoln Way Trail is Beutiful and offers Solitude

Beutiful views within easy reach on the Mount Lincoln Way Trail

Sage wanted to hike, but I had to leave her home. Such a dilemma, I faced as I headed out the door. I wanted to do the Mount Lincoln way trail as high as I could go, but Sage is not allowed in the National Park and she is way overdue for a hike. As I was getting ready to go I had trouble deciding what to do. Go to the ocean where the crowds and the ticks are light but the drive is long or go to Mount Lincoln where there are no crowds but ticks might be an issue and I can’t bring Sage.

In the end the shorter drive to get to staircase won out. So I left Sage at home and felt guilty. I spend so much of my life putting other people and even the first. It is about a 45 minute drive for me to get to Staircase and when I got there I had to wait in line to pay $30.00 to get in. I have a lifetime pass, so I don’t have to pay but everyone in front of me was handing over credit cards.

Sheesh, Staircase and our other national parks have become a very rarified environment that only the rich can afford. The locals who live in the rural areas near our national parks, are mostly priced out and in the mean time trails are not repaired and there is a general maintenance backlog.

“That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital" ~Noam Chomsky

A good example of this is the Lincoln way trail. After the beaver fire the trail was damaged and the park service chose not to rebuild the trail. What a shame, Staircase is such a crowded and horrible zoo it needs more trails.

But then again, with so many people being priced out, especially the locals, perhaps Staircase will not be a zoo on summer weekdays?

Other than waiting in line to pay, I did have a lot of solitude. I only saw six people on the main trail and they were the nice quiet respectful types. Not the noisy frightened yoga pants crowd who feel they have to be really loud all the time to ward off their general discomfort at being in the forest.

I saw a nice young couple on the bridge who were startled when the noticed me sharing the bridge with them. I saw an elderly couple near the start of the Lincoln waytrail and I saw a couple with a very small baby (maybe sleeping) as I rested on the rock overlooking the beaver burn.

I never tell my husband when I am going for a hike, it stresses him out too much. He comes up with huge lists of things I need to do before I can go and reasons why I cannot go at all. To get around this, I leave without telling him and then send him a message on my Delorme that shows where my car is parked. This way he knows where I am and it saves me a ton of stress and maybe him too as I head out.

My Delorme had a dead battery though. Darn it. I always carry three little power cables and a tiny USB battery as a backup. I used to carry spare batteries for every device, but then I realized it would save me weight to just carry one USB battery and two inch long cables for every device. Anyway, I tried to charge up my Delorme with my USB battery and it did not seem to be working. I grabbed a big USB battery from my car to bring along in the hopes that once I took a break I could charge my Delorme.

Then once I got a bit down the trail I realized that my camera battery was nearly dead and I had left the spare battery on the charger. Double dammit. My camera can charge via USB but it takes a special proprietary cord to do it, so I do carry extra batteries for it, but not today it seemed.

So I started my hike in a bit of a funk. I could not tell my spouse where I was, my camera battery was nearly dead and I had to wait in line to pay an asinine amount to get into the park. (yes, I don’t have to pay it, but it still pisses me off.) Then to make matters worse I tweaked my bad ankle every so slightly. Why is my bad ankle acting up again? Must be old age and impending death and disability of course. I’m going to start wearing my ankle brace again.

I had packed a giant external flash, a mini tripod and radio controller because I had hoped to have lots of fun taking photos. With a nearly dead camera battery, they were just extra weight and bulk to haul.

I calmed myself down a bit though, I knew I could take a few pictures even with my low battery and maybe I could charge up my Delorme. Aslo I have NEVER gotten hurt on the trail and needed a SAR call, so the odds of that happening today were rather slim. But I was planning on going kind of off trail, so it would be nice if someone knew where I was.

I was in luck just, as I reached the turn off for the way trail I saw an elderly couple looking at the trail and we chatted for a moment and they saw me go up the trail. So with my car at the trail head and one couple seeing where I went I might be found in an emergency even without my Delorme. Well, at least my cold dead and mangled body would be found.

My old track showed that I would cross a creek but I never did and I needed water. I was about to back track much farther then I wanted to when I heard water. I had heard it all along, but had decided it was wind. The scary kind of wind up on the mountain telling me to turn around before I die. But I listened closely and realized that the sound was too steady to be wind it was actually the water that I needed before I could start climbing.

I brush crashed to a nice little creek and tanked up for the hike. While there, I decided to have a cup of coffee and to try to charge my Delorme. Both things might help cure my funk. It worked, my Delorme started to take a charge! I waited there sipping coffee until my Delorme was 44% charged and then I sent a message to my spouse before I headed up the trail. I also took one photo using my mini tripod. I did not dare take many photos with the battery so low.

Little creek off the waytrail I found a cut log close to the creek and
think there must have been a trail going to it at some point.

I had been up the old way trail once before and I lost the trail in the snow. This time with no snow on the ground, I had hoped to make it further up the trail.

I did manage to go a bit further, found the switchback that I had missed before and went up a ways, but then I ran into an obstacle.

The trail was starting to feel more like a climbers track and that made me nervous and then the trail came out to an avalanche or slide chute. There was no snow, but still I did not want to cross that narrow, steep, unstable shoot. A fall there could twist my ankle and send me on a nasty tumble. I could slip and get hurt crossing it and I was alone. If I had someone with me I would have crossed it. I was alone though, so I turned back there.

On the way down I sat for a moment and found a tick on my pants leg, I flicked it off. I took off my shirt and shook it out and inspected it for ticks too. My shirt was full of pine needles form the brush trail, but no ticks that I could see.

I was too anxious to eat my lunch until after I made it back down to the main trail. Normally I would never eat my lunch on the crowded main trail, but there really were no crowds today, so it was okay.

Smelling a bear very near by and finding a tick did not help with my anxiety at all. I told the bear to go away and sang a few verses of The Happy Wanderer and that helped my nerves immensely. I need to read facebook less, there are too many hiking horror stories on facebook and it is messing with my mind.

But how can anyone feel sad or scared after singing this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GgJHe0bC34

The birds were chirping away merrily, they were not scared because the mountain is their home. Okay wait, the earth is my home, so maybe I should just calm the fuck down. What is with all this anxiety I feel all the time?

I decided to cook my lunch at the rock that overlooks the Beaver Burn area. Then I realized that I had not packed my cookpot. I was way too disorganized getting out of the house. Perhaps I would be more organized if I did not have to sneak out of the house each time. I improvised and cooked my lunch in my coffee mug ½ at a time and it worked.

When I got home I went straight into the shower to check for ticks. Standing and looking at myself in my bathroom mirror I found one of the little bastards firmly attached to my shoulder. Gross! What a terrible tick year this is. I used my moss dissecting tweezers the rip the tick out of my flesh and it hurt lot more that I expected it to.

Later, I looked at the tick with my microscope and saw that I had removed all of its mouth parts from my body. It was a western black legged tick they can carry Lyme and some nasty thing that starts with the letter "A", but since the nymphs like to feed on lizards they don't spread as much disease as most ticks.

This is only the third time I have been bitten by a tick, but in all my years of hiking all three of my tick bites have been in the last five years.

Ticks are bad here now. Too bad I love to hike off trail and straight into the brush. I’m going to start treating everything with .5% pyrethrum and I’m going to start wearing Deet all the time.

I’m not going to stop hiking! I will have to keep Sage’s hair trimmed really short too, so I can find the ticks on her before they bite her.

My next “hike” will be at the beach with no ticks and Sage can join me and my daughter will be driving so it should be grand! Also I will have data the entire time so I can hatch pokemon and dragon eggs.

7 miles with 1,600 feet elevation gain but with all the brush crashing and route finding it felt like more.

The next morning my tick bite was red and nasty, typical tick bite.