A Grand Mis-Adventure, Part II

Day three, Thursday, started with one last burst of rainshowers on the tent fly. Vinh and I waited out the rain before climbing out of the tent and packing up our things. Once we said goodbye to Nathanael we were off to further adventures. Our plan was to try to pick up some ground, making it most of the way down the coast in that one day, at least 10 miles. The beaches were amazing that morning, and only a light sprinkling of dewy mist fell.

Once we rounded the small headland that had socked us in the night before, we were faced with the first of a few "rope assists" to get over some unroundable headlands. I started to get a touch of vertigo as we walked along narrow trails and clung to ropes to help pull ourselves up over the still-soaked cliffs. Some of the outlooks were ridiculously spectacular, but I could neither take a picture nor linger for very long since we needed to go a fairly good distance before we could stop worrying about the tide that would start coming back in about an hour. Up and down we went, twice. Then around another very rocky headland where my hands really started to ache from clinging to scratchy ropes and sharp rocks. The boulders were very large and somewhat slippery, adding to how tired my legs were starting to get.

Then came the third and final rope assist. Up wasn't too bad, although I was getting more exhausted and experiencing more vertigo. I slipped a couple times while going up and on the first rope going down. Then came the second rope to the beach... The trail that you used the rope to descend had basically been washed out and stripped bare by the people who had gone down the trail ahead of us. It was nothing more than a muddy chute, slick as can be, with a fat, scratchy yellow rope to cling to. Vinh went down first. I heard a sound come from him which I understood to mean I could start. Turns out, he'd fallen down the second half of the trail, scratching his leg and rope burning his entire arm as he caught himself.

I started down the trail slowly, digging my boots in and allowing myself to slide down slowly. At a few points I became physically and emotionally stuck. I was so scared that I froze, unable to move a hand or a foot for fear of falling the 30 or so feet to the rocky beach below. Eventually, right around where Vinh had slipped himself, he convinced me to take off my pack and slide it down to him. It could have had to do with the fact that I was having a panic attack while clinging to the rope... Taking the pack off was incredibly difficult as my weight shifted back and forth and I could feel my feet sliding out from under me at times. Finally, I made it down the last stretch and just let all of it out--the vertigo, the fear, the shaky mud-coated legs, the scratched, beaten and mud-caked hands, all of it came pouring down my cheeks. But we weren't done yet.

Next, we had to go around yet another headland, bouldering for over 0.7 miles. Doesn't sound like a lot, but we did it over the course of maybe, a half an hour, moving as fast as I could at that point. Vinh could have done it much faster, as he's a wiz on the rocks, but I was still so shaky and the rocks so large and slippery that it took me a long time. Plus, we'd run out of fresh water (our overnight campsite had not had access to a stream) and I was getting dehydrated. When we'd gotten around that headland and one more smaller trek, we were on a long sandy beach... and I just demanded a break.

We came across a stream, maybe 3 miles from where we'd started, 3 hours after we'd started, with almost no breaks in between as we raced the tide. Vinh pumped water and we mixed some gatoraide in my water bladder to rehydrate me. Laying on this wonderful, sandy beach, looking back towards the headlands we'd just crossed (Point of Arches still in view in the distance), I suggested just staying. We'd have problems if we tried to rush to the other headlands since I couldn't go fast enough without a break. There was no way to make it the distance we needed to to be able to get past the reserved-only campsites, and I didn't want to end up pushing our luck on some not-quite low tides.

We ended up camped on the beach, our tent facing north west with a spectacular view of the creek flowing into the ocean and the sea stacks in the distance. Vinh built another fire without a firestarter this time, then relocated it to a better spot (how he did this still baffles me), and then watched as the beach flies died in massacre quantities as they flew too close to the roaring flames. We made pesto pasta with fried salami and flatbread cooked in the salami grease (trust me, I needed the nutrients at that point) and slept extremely well until waking up at the crack of dawn the next day... determined to get cell phone signal, call my dad and bail out at Cape Alava.