20240718 Bridgeport to South Lake Tahoe (mile 1050)

We awoke in the historic Bridgeport Inn to a historic stink. We had been unable to find anywhere to do laundry in town the day before and so had attempted to do it in the hotel shower with a detergent pod and a drybag. With nowhere to dry and clothes hanging everywhere in the tiny twin room, the three of us were stuck marinating all night in there with it. Fortunately we had the foresight to cram our hiking shoes into the small chest of drawers at the far end of the room, but there was definitely a funk in the air by the time the hot July sun rose over town.

Bristol Jasper was heading north on highway 395, straight to South Lake Tahoe. He had only come to California to section-hike the Sierra, and his flight home loomed on the horizon. We had hiked with him solidly since Red's Meadow so it was sad to see him go. As we stumbled about trying to locate breakfast and make plans for getting back to trail, and yell came down to us from on of the first floor windows at Rhino's Bar & Grill.

"You guys need a ride?"

Squinting up in the morning sun we could just about make out Steve, the bar's owner, silhouetted against one of the windows.

Steve, an ex-prosthetics nurse from LA, had been curious about us the previous night and come to quiz us as we sat outside the bar in our 'clean' non-hiking clothes (it is common to see hikers wearing essentially a combination of their pyjamas - long woollen underwear - and a rain jacket around town as they wait for their clothes to dry). The sun had set and we were enjoying the momentarily cooler night air before heading back to sleep. I guess his staff had told him about the odd English group who had been in since 11am eating chicken wings and playing pool, and he wanted to check us out. In twenty minutes he had given us the unofficial unabridged history of Bridgeport, explained exactly where and why everything was as it was, and even pointed us to the haunted hotel over the road: "last week these Germans woke the whole street up screaming one night, they left before it got light, it's totally fucked up in there."

We couldn't have been happier to say yes to his offer for an easy way out of town.

"Give me five minutes, I'll come down and pull the Tesla around."

An hour later we had said farewell to Jasper, with him heading off to catch a bus (Steve: "He's walking towards the jail, does he know where he's going? Maybe I should have told him."), and Grace and I were zooming off to Kennedy Meadows North in his spanking new EV.

Kennedy Meadows North was not altogether dissimilar to Kennedy Meadows South, but for the presence of about 200 horses in a nearby paddock. It also started to bucket down as we arrived, soon giving the entire place a familiar farm smell. Thankfully there were proper washer/dryer machines, and also the opportunity to sit down and eat some food on the deck. Grace promptly realised she had lost an earring, which she believed had dropped down between the wooden boards of the decking, and I mentioned to the host at the front desk while paying for use of the facilities.

"Sorry to be a bother, but my girlfriend's dropped an earring down one of your floorboards over there - I don't suppose there's any way to get under the decking to have a quick look is there?"

Little was I aware the trouble that this would lead to.

Soon I was stood out back on the opposite side of the building with an old school cattle rancher called Michael as he used a Bosch to unscrew the fittings around a small wooden panel that was apparently to only access to the decking on the other side. As soon as he wrenched it away from the rest of the housing I had my doubts. It was dank down there, pitch black and cobwebby. "I'd better go and get my headlamp," I said, but he shook his head incredulously.

"We can't have customers going down there. Far too many cancer-causing chemicals."

I was told to go and shine a light down the gap in the decking where I thought the earring had fallen and that he would be be along in a few minutes just as soon as he could make his way under there. At this point I was really stressed out. Grace had not actually seen the earring fall through the decking, and in any case, they were just a cheap pair I had bought to cheer her up when she was feeling a bit down in Bishop. Hardly worth all this bother.

At the other end of the building around 90ft away I paced anxiously keeping an ear out for any scuffling down below. When I shone the light down I could see nothing but broken wood and a thick bed of pine needles. I certainly couldn't see any sign of an earring. Waiting there, with my elbows propped up on the balustrade, gloomily thinking about the fuss Michael would have to go through to get all that way, a man clumped up alongside me. He was eating a cheeseburger and wearing cowboy boots. It was Michael.

"No luck getting down there, eh?" I said, slightly relieved.

"Nope, too small for me. I've sent Gabe down." Gabe? Who was Gabe? "He should be along in a minute. Keep shining that light down there."

Gabe, it turned out, was another of the Kennedy Meadows North staffers, and apparently the one most suited to crawling under the decking and looking for missing earrings. Right on cue there were sounds from below and as I peered through the gaps there was the hint of something moving, a flash of blue plaid shirt and brown moustache. I tried my best to direct Gabe through the floorboards.

"It's a small green earring, with a hummingbird on it." I said uselessly.

A toothless old man on a quad bike ripped up to us and began talking with Michael, cackling at the news that Gabe was down under the decking somewhere, and I got the impression that if anyone on the team was going to be sent down there it would have been Gabe. Michael wandered off and the quadbike man went about his business elsewhere, but Gabe persisted. After a while minutes I shouted down.

"Listen Gabe, I really think you would have seen it by now, why don't you come on back up?"

"Thanks but I'm gonna keep looking a little while longer! There's a lot of pine needed down here and I just want to make sure I've sifted through them all."

"Gabe mate, I really think it would have just been there on top of it was going to be anywhere. I feel awful with you being down there this long."

"It's okay, I don't mind it! I'm going to stay down here looking a while longer."

This posed a serious problem for me, and one that I did not feel qualified to deal with. After some more attempts at reasoning with Gabe I went back to the reception host to plead with a higher authority.

"Oh," she said with a smile. "That's just Gabe. He's not the brightest bulb bless him."

By this time the storm was in full swing, with lightning streaking across the sky. Grace and I sat huddled on a bench waiting gloomily for the 4pm shuttle back to the trailhead, trying to forget about Gabe's plight under the floorboards, and making the most of the spotty WiFi to learn about the new wildfires popping up in northern California. It seemed like there was a new one every day, and while hard to square with the rain lashing down all around us, it was clear that the lightning was a big risk even here. As we shivered on the bench we also had to remind ourselves that we were nearly at 2000m, and that lower elevations were still scorchingly hot. Yes, wildfires were shaping up to be the next big challenge that we would have to navigate.

Fortunately we had a clear run until at least the end of the Sierra before we would need to contend with this, and so, laden with one of the most expensive dollar-per-day resupplies of the trail thus far from the tiny store, we bundled ourselves into the back of a minivan and headed back out onto the trail.

Things were looking up that first evening as we climbed higher and higher still. The rains passed and we soon descended down into a valley of curly green leaves and colourful wildflowers. We camped beneath tall trees with a handful of other hikers (one of whom had packed out "too much" pizza, and that I was able to snag a couple of slices from).

The next day however started badly and swiftly got worse. Not long after breaking camp I managed to walk headfirst into the end of a blown down tree, giving me what I assume was a minor concussion. After I was done swearing and clutching my skull I was some way behind grace, and had to made double speed up the mountain. Even at that altitude it was sweltering hot work, with the sun fully up in the mid-morning sky. At the top we sat in a bush and cracked open our cursed bear cans to eat some snacks. We had become ever more proficient since Kennedy Meadows South at packing the horrible blue transparent plastic cans with food so that we rarely went hungry like we did in those early days of the Sierra. We did however hate having to carry them. They wouldn't fit inside our bags so we had to tie them atop them using the Y-strap that served to secure the roll-top of our packs. It was always a pain and totally offset your centre of gravity having so much weight so high up on your shoulders, and you had to be very careful when strapping them on.

On this occasion I was not careful enough.

About five minutes into the descent the entire can, all 1.2kg of plastic plus five day's food (assume at least one kilo per day), fell from a height of five feet directly onto my outstretched ankle bone. It was excruciating.

Still clutching my head and now unable to walk, I managed to limp down as far as a small tarn where Grace gathered me some ice from a small patch of snow which I held to the whacked area. After half an hour and some more snacks I tried to walk on it. It wasn't good.

The dilemma of what to do was thankfully not an agonising one. Several (sore) miles ahead at Ebbetts Pass was a road, and with plenty of daylight left we would be able to make it somewhere at least, if not all the way to South Lake Tahoe. It was clear I needed to rest it at the very least, and possibly get it checked by a professional. In any case, there was no way I would make it to Tahoe by foot in the time (and with the food) we had budgeted.

We managed to get a hitch easily enough with a mother and young daughter taking a roadtrip through California's national parks, who dropped us off in Gardnerville, Nevada. (The first thing to know about Nevada is that gambling is legal and casinos are everywhere.) With an hour to kill before the bus, which conveniently went directly to Tahoe, we sat down and had a glass of cold rosé in the local 'pub'. The bus itself was air-conditioned and free, and I left Nevada with an impression of utmost civility.

Back in California we rented an incredibly shit motel for more money than seemed reasonable, and went out for dinner with friends Banter, Pope, Platinum and Platinum's girlfriend who was paying him a trial visit. By the time we had finished my ankle had swollen to the size of a grapefruit and would not take any weight at all, and so the next day I hauled myself into another free bus to get an x-ray. The $290 hurt almost as much as the initial injury, but it was nice to not have to wait for six hours in the grimy Bristol A&E.

We celebrated the lack of any structural damage to my bone at the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant, sensibly located right next to the hospital, and spent the next few days resting up.