Before meeting up with Tim, Tinkle, Daisy, and I joked about purposefully skipping a shower in Bridgeport, to give him an accurate representation of what my usual stench was. After all, only two and a half days of hiking with no shower is light stench, at most. Luckily for Tim, I had wanted to be clean more than I wanted to educate him. I’m sure by normal human standards, I stank up the rental car pretty good anyway, but Tim didn’t complain, either because he’s nice or was afraid I’d try to hug him or something and stink him up, too. I took a few days off in SLT with him, paddle boarding, eating obscene amounts of food at the casino buffets, and zooming around on the electric scooters that the town boasted. It was really exciting to have him meet my Tramily, who continued hiking the 20ish miles that I skipped. I realized how strange it was that I wanted to eat five meals per day, having a normal person around to witness the gluttony. Also notable, we saw a bear! Biking back from hanging out with Daisy and Tinkle, I saw a dark shape about 20 feet in front of me, crossing the bike path. I stopped, only managing the mental power to yell “BEAR! BEAR!” before Tim could bike past me towards it. We watched it cautiously walk out of the trees, then run across the street to the IHOP, where I’m sure it tried to take advantage of the dumpster pancake deals.
I said goodbye to Tim and the tramily and I went to the same IHOP on a hot California morning. Afterwards, we had our longest wait to hitch, about an hour. That day, we made about 10 miles and camped by a beautiful lake just after mile 1100. There’s some debate as to the actual end of the Sierra Nevada section, but in my head, the next morning I started into North California.
MountainMaddy 