If you were wondering, yes, this post’s title is definitely inspired by a fantastic Doctor Who episode of the same name. While I didn’t meet up with the Doctor during the stretch from Hart’s Pass to the first town of Stehekin, I did encounter a stranger who offered me this very same advice.
Let me back up. What happened was this: I was several days out from Hart’s Pass. The scenery had been gorgeous, and I had been both pushing myself a little while still not trying to risk injury from starting too fast.
Before I started the hike, I’d gotten all the official detour details for a bridge that washed out this last winter. By the time I reached the turn off for the detour, it was Saturday, and I’d been hiking for a week without any cell service. I was tired. There had been a lot of blowdowns in certain sections already, and this detour was no exception.
It wasn’t like climbing over a few dozen trees should be that bad, but I’d hiked over 10 miles already that day, and I was tired. Bone tired. The kind of tired I only ever feel when thru-hiking, when it feels like it might actually be impossible to move another inch. At one point, I stared at a waist high blowdown for a few moments and then promptly lay down and took a 30 minute nap.
After the nap, I felt a little better. I climbed over the blowdown. And the next one. And kept climbing up, up the hill of the detour trail. I stopped to grab some water from a small waterfall cascading over the trail, and moved out of the way as another hiker strode down and past. And then he turned around.
“You going up or down?”
“Up,” I replied.
“Okay, so when you see pink markers, turn and go left.”
“Left?”
“Yeah I missed them on my way up, but they’ll get you around most of the blowdowns.”
“And I’ll end up at the same place?” I asked, envisioning a forking trail and not quite sure I had this right.
He nodded.
“Alright, pink markers, turn left,” I repeated. “Thank you.”
He headed off on his way down, and I started my climb again. Shortly after, I came across a wall of blowdowns. Following the stranger’s suggestion, I looked left. It took me a moment to spot the pink ribbon hanging from the end of a branch, but there it was. However, in this case, left also meant straight up into the brush of a very steep hillside.
This was not a trail to turn onto. But what the heck, I had to get around this blockade somehow. Feeling dubious, I turned left and grabbed some branches to scramble up the extremely steep side. I went straight up. Sure enough, I caught glimpses of disturbed dirt where hikers before me had made the same climb. Suddenly, I was back on the trail again; it had switchbacked around. The tree blockade stretched even higher, so up I went again, straight up the brushy hillside.
I repeated this three times, leapfrogging from each stretch of switchbacking trail to the next until I was clear, silently thanking the stranger. If I’d tried to follow the trail – and I would have if he hadn’t said anything – it probably would have been at least an extra half hour of scrambling.
I eventually made it to the lake to camp, four miles into the detour, where a ranger was checking permits. When I gave her my PCT one, she gave me a blank look.
“PCT?”
“Because of the detour, you know,” I said. “Since the bridge is out.”
The ranger stared at me. “Oh,” she said. “They got that back up two days ago.”
The only thing I could say was, “Nice.”
As it turned out, the rest of the detour was absolutely gorgeous – a high mountain pass and then a trail that followed a gorge with a river, before eventually crossing that river on a suspension bridge. So I’m not displeased to have missed the bridge memo.
I made it into the tiny town of Stehekin, which is so remote it cannot be accessed by road, and grabbed a raspberry scone at the famous bakery. The scone was delicious. The postmaster opened the post office for 15 minutes on July 5th just to let all us hikers get our resupply boxes, and now I’m just waiting for the afternoon bus to head back out to the trail!
