Waptus Lake: 7/16/2004

ramblescramble

Jul 16

Jason and I used to be hilariously stupid backpackers, but fortunately it never killed us. Could have, though. Here are a few of the stupid things we did on this trip.

We might have brought a map

This trail is as straightforward as they come, but the only “map” we brought was a photocopy of the illustration provided in Manning and Spring’s 100 Hikes in Washington’s Alpine Lakes. Honestly, a map wouldn’t have helped, because there’s no way we would have known how to read it. We still would have taken a wrong turn onto a service road (after stepping over sticks and limbs placed to keep hikers on the trail). We still would have vastly overestimated our progress. Still, we should have brought a map.

Jason ate too many cherries

Rainier cherries were in season. Shortly after starting out, Jason produced what looked to be a pound of them in a plastic produce bag. “Want any cherries?” I declined, because cherries are too much work for me with all of the chewing around the pits that’s required. Well then, more cherries for Jason.

An hour or so in, Jason’s tummy was hit with serious rumblies. Dropping his pack, he worked his into the brush on the uphill side of the trail, disappearing for 20 minutes or more. He returned with the gaunt, ashen face of a mummy, as if every nutrient and drop of moisture had been wrung from his body by a petty and sadistic child god. We had covered only two of the hike’s nine miles, and Jay was the walking dead. Still, he filled up his bottles at a nearby waterfall, and we continued on. Soon after, a passing forest ranger passed us and politely suggested a riverside campsite just a little further along the trail.

I thought you brought the water filter

Despite Jay’s volcanic Rainier cherries event, we had made it all the way to the lake. One of the chores of setting up camp is filtering water for the evening’s cooking and our original vodka-and-lemon cocktail, known as the Mountain Twist. Our packs were heavy in those days, so we optimized by sharing gear and splitting the load. (It’s how we managed to bring two pair of clean blue jeans each.) A bad way to do this is to decide who’s-bringing-what at the trailhead, and when we went to get water from the lake, we discovered that neither of us had packed a filter. (Jason was supposed to bring the filter.) It’s fine. We have a stove, and we can boil lake water as we needed it. A bit of a hassle, but it’s fine.

The Coleman 502 Sportster stove

We had been wrangling with this stove for more than 20 years for no good reason at all—modern, dependable, and relatively lightweight canister stoves were cheap and available. The Sportster was state-of-the-art in the ‘60s and 70s, an outdoorsman’s true friend, but this particular Sportster had and long since begun to break down. Still, we got through the first night with little trouble.

The fuel was pressurized by repeatedly pumping a “plunger knob” on the side of the tank. The seal around the knob had been deteriorating for decades, but on day two at Waptus Lake, it failed entirely. With a water filter, we could have hydrated our food (and our bodies), as sub-optimal as eating cold mush would have been. With a stove, we could have sterilized our water without a filter. Now we had neither, facing the possibility of drinking straight lake water with is potential giardia and cryptosporidium. Jason had already experienced gastric distress with his bag of cherries, but these lurking microbes promised much longer-term effects.

Fortunately, Jason is a tinkerer and a hero. He had brought a ramen-style package of pad thai, and one of its components was a pouch of chili oil for seasoning. Smearing the oil between the pump seating and the tank, he created a seal that allowed the fuel inside to be pressurized and forced to the burner. A temporary solution for sure, but we had enough chili oil to get us through the trip.

The stove erupted in flames when Jay lit the burner, just as it had in 1985. Also just like 1985, Jay dropped it to the ground where it set a small part of the forest floor aflame. Fortunately I had seen this before, in 1985, and positioned myself near our store of (unfiltered) water, and the fire was easily doused.