Day Four, August 7:
Tricia was stiff in a lot of places when she woke up. The hurt knee still hurt, but so did several other places; she'd tried to compensate for the hurt knee and in the process touched off other pains. She also had a sore throat (and had a full-on flu by the time we got off the trail and back to Darrington - I have that flu now as I write this).
We talked about exiting early, but doing so wouldn't necessarily be easy. Five miles down trail was the High Bridge ranger station in North Cascades National Park. A road led from there 12 miles downstream along the Stehekin River to the town of Stehekin. A shuttle was available from the ranger station to town, but leaving early wouldn't end there. Stehekin is at the far northwest end of Lake Chelan, a 50 mile long (a mile to two wide) lake which originates far to the southeast. There are no roads to Stehekin (and the one road from it simply goes up into the national park - connecting to nothing - as a one-way road). The only way there or back is by ferry or floatplane.
I texted Vicki about our dilemma. She soon texted back the schedule for the shuttle bus and it was apparent that we could catch an early-afternoon shuttle to Stehekin (and when we got these, the schedule was posted at the ranger station too). But, she texted a few minutes later, the ferry ran two times a day and was all booked up for the next two and a half days! (At least the dogs could ride on both - on leash of course, and in a crate on the ferry.)
Armed with some knowledge, we started down to High Bridge:
We got an excellent view up Bridge Creek Canyon - the PCT follows this canyon for 17 miles after High Bridge, all the way to Highway 20 and Rainy Pass:
There are actually two "high bridges," one for people on foot over Agnes Creek and one for vehicles over the Stehekin River (the first bridge is the boundary of North Cascades National Park - the only such park I know of that lets dogs in, if they're on leash):
This is why I commented that Agnes Creek would be called a river in the Sierra; it's big:
High Bridge was easy to find:
There were no Park Service personnel around when we got there. We made ourselves comfortable while we talked about what to do:
Tricia was feeling ill (as I commented above, it turned out to be the flu that's going around) and her knee was definitely hurt. She'd been hiking OK during the five morning miles; this by a combination of ibuprofen, grit and us sticking close and talking to distract her. But another 17 miles in a day and a half seemed too much.
But going out presented at least as many uncertainties. We could ride down to Stehekin, but then what? We had no money (Tricia has Apple Pay on her phone, but it was at zero charge). We were almost out of food for us and had one more day for the dogs. And according to Vicki, we couldn't get a ferry ride to the town of Chelan for another two days.
We waited.
Finally, after almost two hours, a ranger drove by, heading up the road and river (it turns out that the road only goes another two miles - to a small campground). Eventually, when that ranger was driving back, I flagged him down.
There followed a very happy convergence. First, the ranger told us about a campground that the Park Service maintained on the edge of Stehekin for visitors heading in and out of the area. All of the sites here were currently booked, but the campground had a less-formal overflow area and he was comfortable that we'd fit into that. Second, the ranger understood the knee issue and flat told us that he'd drive all four of us to this campground if we decided to evacuate (and the campground is less than 1/10 mile from the Stehekin ferry terminal).
As we were having the second part of this conversation, I got a text via satellite from Vicki (all of my texting back there was by satellite - there's no normal reception). There'd been a cancellation and she'd grabbed while she could: we were booked on a ferry ride to Chelan; all four of us at 12:30 the next day.
This made the decision easy. We gratefully rode with the ranger to the campground, getting a full tour of the park along the road and the private community at its lake-end as we rode.
It turns out too that the town of Stehekin is quite used to PCT hikers diverging down stream for supplies and even for full "zero" days (every hiker we met who intended to go to Stehekin mentioned "the bakery" there). In camp we saw three through-hikers that we'd already met on the trail, all off for a day before the final hiking to the border. We talked a lot of PCT with all three (and one of them - from northwestern Washington - had climbed a few days at Pinnacles, our Pinnacles!). Eventually Tricia hobbled a few hundred yards into "town" to see where things were. She was able to charge her phone and then use it to buy some fresh food for snacks. We spent a very nice afternoon in what's called Lakeview Campground:
