Day 162: the long shortcut

Thursday 9/27/12
Miles 2288-2303 (15 miles)
Elevation 4,441'

Hahaha, we were camped by a bunch of glaciers, and one of them looked like cookie monster throwing a cookie in his mouth. I have a pic of Kyle drinking coffee in front of this glacier, it's hilarious :D

So, the coolest part of today was the chairlift trail short cut. The trail goes around the backside of the White Pass ski area. There is a trail called the Chairlift Trail which brings you to the chairlift of the ski run, at which point it becomes like a "choose your own adventure trail" because there is no actual trail, you're just walking down the ski slopes. But the gas station where our food drop is was at the bottom of the ski slope. Plus it cut out 4 miles of the pct. So it would save time. Or so I thought. Lol!

The whole way coming out of trout lake, I didn't have maps (they were in the missing food box), and my GPS on my phone wasn't working. Go figure. Lol. I knew I was close to the chairlift trail, and I wasn't sure if it was a marked trail or not, so the first time I saw a chair lift I just bushwhacked toward it and started going down the slope. It was awesome because there were tractor tracks so I just walked on the tread down the slope. I wasn't sure where I was going but I figured all the slopes would eventually go where I needed so I just started going down hills. Now, the smart thing to do would have looked at the maps on the chairlifts and figured out where I was.

When I finally got to the bottom, I found Kyle and other hikers at the store. It was like a reunion! Apparently I took the wrong chairlift trail. There was another chair lift that the trail crosses. That was the correct one. In the end, my shortcut actually took longer than if I were to have just stayed on the PCT. lol! But it was so much more fun :). So where I ended up was way on the other side of the slope, because when I got down the hill I saw the store and the big ski lift about a 1/2 mile away. Haha, oh well. :)

It was cool to see Pitfall, Diesel, Chameleon, Doe Eyes, and Scrub Rat again! We also met a cool section Hirt who was hiking with his dog Chase. This guy trains professional sled dogs in Alaska, and Chase was a sled dog. He was sooooo cute! Pitfall and I wanted to take Chase and hike to Canada with him. Lol. Chase was such a cute puppy! He was 1 years old.

Anyhow, we ended up camping at some campground we found near te store. Cool! It was a fun lazy day today :)