9/24/2023
Section: Milepost 789.7 to 789.7
Total Trail Miles: 2147.5 Miles
Distance: 0 Miles
Moving Time: 0 Hrs
Elevation Gain: 0 ft
In the morning we had breakfast outside, just as we had in July. The Basecamp motel makes a wonderful spread and encourages social eating with other guests, which was a nice change from our quiet and quick trail breakys. We ate at a table with a middle-aged couple who had done all of California on the PCT and a fascinating guy from Cincinnati named Charlie. As I may have mentioned a few times before, I am currently reading the Wheel of Time. So far, the books have been pretty good. Turns out that Charlie is a hardcore WoT aficionado. With nothing big on the agenda I talked with Charlie for several hours about the series. Evidently there is a website that helps track where the characters are in the story as you go through the books and Robert Jordan borrowed heavily from Tolkien in the early books as a way to hook some of the LoTR fans onto his books. We also talked about Oppenheimer since 2023 was the summer of Barbie-heimer as well as Chernobyl and politics. A little bit of everything.
As I was going a little too deep on the world of WoT with Charlie, Amanda left and went back to the room to do some of what we now call “Digital Organization.” A couple of Canadian girls from the JMT dropped in on Charlie and my conversation and the morning passed by quickly under the shade of the trees in the middle patio of the Mt. Williamson Basecamp Motel.
At noon, we said goodbye to Charlie - who was heading out that day and made our way to the local taco truck in the center of Independence. While there, we sat with a family doing the JMT and talked to them as we tucked into some good, good tacos. Super nice to talk - almost everyone walking a long trail of some sort is really fun to converse with. After tacos, Amanda and I headed to what may be our favorite little ice cream shop in the world - the Eastern Sierra Ice Cream Company - for some wonderfully unique flavors. I had one called Jalepenut and Amanda got a lavender corn bread flavor that was super good. We saw the fly fishing couple at the ice cream place but they didn’t stick around long enough to say hello.
After our ice cream outing, we came back to the room and chilled in the cool for a while before heading back to Still Life Cafe to enjoy some more slow-cooked goodness. They were totally inundated on this Sunday evening but we didn’t mind just enjoying the peace of being off the trail for a few days and knowing that we would miss these moments when it was all done. After dinner we walked back to the motel, again under the imposing relief of the Sierra and passed out in the room, ready to fly back up to Portland for the second time, but this time to head north to the finish.
