Because I'd camped right on the ridge, the sun hit my tarp right at dawn. I was treated to a light display as the frost on the grass and my bag reflected crystalline. Time to make the donuts!
It was still a few miles to the Brazos Ridge Overlook and my reunion with the NNML, but they came easier. The snow and mud was frozen hard, keeping my footing secure and my feet dry. I hit the overlook by ten and gave a quick yip of joy. That had been a hard approach to the trail!
Back on the route, I rambled cross country along a ridge of frozen forests and meadows. The ground became really rocky, and then, at a high point in the ridge, I saw that someone had made a little tower out of the rocks.
But who and why? I mean, this is a remote spot -- an unnamed high spot on an remote, roadless, trailless ridge. It would have taken a lot of time to build that thing! Was it some artifact of Native American culture? A marker for the border of a ranch? A prank? Even more impressive, in terms of difficulty of construction, was the hole next to the tower.
Kind of a perfect metaphor for these mountains, I thought: The ridges lol impressive from afar, but the canyons blow you away once you're up close.
The route took me down the ridge and then through groves of aspen towards the head of a valley. As I lost elevation, everything got very green. It was nice hiking through the open forest, but my spider-sense started to tingle -- I had no visibility through the trees, and the forest felt very, very beary. Like a likely place to see a bear.
I popped my earbuds out and started yelling my "hey bears," feeling kind of dumb for doing so. I mean, seeing a bear is mostly a matter of probability. I'd been in bear country for most of the trip. For that matter, I spent all last summer in bear country when hiking the PCT. But I hadn't actually seen one in a couple years. Meh, I'm just being bearanoid, I thought. Up ahead I could see the vivid green of the valley's meadow floor.
And then, up ahead, I saw a bear. Like not quite far enough away for comfort, either. It hadn't spotted or scented me, so I used the opportunity to back up another 30 feet or so. Then I yelled as loud as I could to alert the big guy -- and this was a pretty big bear, almost true black in color -- to my presence.
It looked up at me, paused, and started to amble towards me.
This was not, I thought, a positive development. They're supposed to run away when you yell at them, you see. It's modern wilderness etiquette. The expression "my blood ran cold" really seems cliched until you've experienced it; but as my system flooded with adrenaline, I felt pretty icy. The bear went out of sight in a little depression in the slope, and I scooted off to the right as quick as I could, tossing glances behind my shoulder as I went. I circled around the head of the valley, spooking four or five elk in the process (thinking "cool guys, majesty of elk in nature, blah blah blah, will be impressed later, currently in flight or fight moment and unable to experience the sublime").
I never spotted the bear again. As the adrenaline wore off, it was replaced with elation. Man, nothing makes you feel alive like walking up on a bear! It's like fifteen roller coasters at once. I mean, I would have preferred to see it from a bit further off, but now that it was behind me, I was walking on clouds.
The sweetness of being alive was enhanced by the landscape as I walked down the valley. Rich green grasses were dotted with wildflowers and shaded by rock outcroppings and cliffs along the canyonside. I started to see people: a couple camping with their dog, several fishermen. It's Memorial Day weekend, I realized, and there's a trailhead nearby.
The route took me back down to an intersection with my old friend Road 87, which I'd been following or shadowing for days. Brett's map had me dive down into another canyon, flowing it as it became a tributary of the Rio San Antonio.
Rio, huh. I reflected on what a pain the Rio Pino had been. I didn't really want to face another sketchy river crossing. I gauged my risk-friendliness in the wake of my bear-enhanced morning and found it quite low. Maybe I'd take the road! I checked the maps and saw that I could hike down to a crossing of the San Antonio at the bottom of the range, where my route started to lead across a broad plain. Earbuds in, podcast on, and I was off.
There were a lot of people in pickups, driving the road for fun. Five or six miles in, I was hailed by an older guy solo car camping; he then started walking next to me.
He told me he had been an avid backpacker, and that he had "always liked hikers," he said. Probably harmless, I thought, but that phrasing was also really creepy. I didn't know what to do with him -- I hadn't asked him to walk with me, and I didn't really know what sort of conversation to strike up. There was something a bit too keen in his expression.
Bears may be terrifying, but it's the humans that are dangerous, I thought. I picked up the pace and he finally stopped.
Creepy!
Down at the base of the range, I crossed the San Antonio on a bridge, spying a beaver in a pool nearby. I followed the road until my route veered off to the left, following the river's canyon. I passed an old farm, solitary in a meadow.
As light faded, I started to hunt for a campsite along the canyon rim. I kept passing up reasonable sites hoping for a bodacious one, with the predictable result that at 9 pm, I was kicking cow shit out of the way in the dark to make myself a spot in the brush to crash.
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