This one time at Fat Camp

A few weeks ago, while I was nursing weak lungs and a festering disappointment about my failed Tour Divide, I received a text from my friend Danni in Montana, who I've missed and haven't seen in at least two years. She asked if I wanted to join a group of friends for a backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, playfully dubbed "Fat Camp." I was unsure about my health and the logistics of wedging another trip into this already-packed year, but at the last minute decided I couldn't bear to miss it. 

"I SO want to join you," I replied. "Otherwise this will be the worst summer ever, seriously." 

"I'm really pathetically fat and out of shape, so don't worry even if you still have pneumonia," Danni wrote. 

I couldn't ask for better backpacking companions — self-contained and capable women from a variety of backgrounds. There's Amber, a fish biologist and fast mountain biker/skier from Kalispell, Montana; Lora, another biologist/skier/climber in Corvalis, Oregon; Danni, a lawyer/mother who is not fat and out of shape, but is understandably too busy to spend much time on recreation; me, with slightly asthmatic and decidedly clumsy tendencies who arguably doesn't bring a lot to the table on a trip like this; and Meghan, a fiercely fit trail runner who floats effortlessly up steep boulder fields, lives in Moab, Utah, and co-manages the popular ultrarunning news site, iRunFar.

 It's a natural and yet unique dynamic — five thirty-something women in the woods. With no husbands or boyfriends in sight, we were an anomaly, and nearly everyone we spoke with made some sort of comment along the lines of "wow, all girls." Calling the tradition "Fat Camp" is something of a play on this, I think. Fat Camp refers to the perpetual hunger one often experiences in the backcountry, but also alludes to the stereotype that the only reason women engage in physical activity is to lose weight.


I hate going hungry, more than I hate struggling under big backpacks, so I packed an enormous amount of food. I thought my supply was reasonable for five days, but I was still thinking more in terms of the Tour Divide, when I was mowing through 5,000-plus calories a day. Out here, even with difficult terrain that pushed our 11-mile days into the 5- to 9-hour range, 3,000 calories were about all I could stomach. I ended up with nearly three days' worth of extra food, but it's nice to know I can carry what I need for a week or more in the backcountry.

At the airport, my pack weighed 28 pounds before I added water, bear spray, electronics, and fuel. It was an unwieldy thing, and I have been spoiled by bikepacking, which lets the bike do the carrying and only requires extra leg work from me. Having all that weight on my upper body threw me off kilter. I stumbled and fell a number of times during the first two miles, which descended 2,000 feet into the Long Lake valley. Near the bottom I fell hard on my left arm, spraining my wrist. This minor injury would bother me a lot for the next two days, but healed just in time to negotiate the most difficult scrambles of the route.

Volatile thunderstorms greeted us on the climb up Pine Creek Canyon, and then it proceeded to rain for the next ten hours. We constructed a small tarp shelter and cooked soggy dinners before setting up our tents. My Big Agnes Seedhouse 2 is now six years old and leaks in a few places, but the two-person tent allowed enough room to keep my sleeping bag centered in the dry spot as it rained and rained through the night. It would have been more of a hazard if I'd shared the tent with someone else. Unfortunately I left my backpack in the collapsed vestibule, and most of my other gear got wet.

 Day two took us from our camp on Trapper Lake to the Highline Trail, and deeper into high country. The Wind Rivers are a spectacular mountain range, rising abruptly from the high desert of central Wyoming. During the Tour Divide, I rode along the foothills of these mountains en route to the flat expanse of the Great Divide Basin. That section of the GDMBR isn't particularly exciting, and from a distance, the snow-capped peaks of the Winds are merely pretty. I didn't really know what to expect going into this trip, but I now understand why this range is a backpacking paradise. Just one day of travel from any trailhead will put you deep into craggy alpine terrain, almost entirely undeveloped and mostly above tree line, with the soaring skylines of 13,000'ers all around you.

 We thought our plan to average 11 miles per day would give us lots of time for lounging, and it did. But travel wasn't easy — there was lots of climbing and the terrain was rocky, even when we had a trail to follow. We did manage enough extra time in the evening for a scramble above the Green River, where Danni and I laughed about being ill-prepared with Hokas. They're great shoes for running and all-day walking, but less ideal for shorter bouts of ankle-rolling, crack-wedging, boulder-hopping hiking.

 Day three took us to the end of the Green River Valley, over Shannon Pass, and then up the steep face of Knapsack Col. I once rafted a long section of the Green River across Utah, and it was fun to visit its topmost headwaters, where the wide, muddy river I know and love is just a clearwater trickle beside bursts of wildflowers.

 Scaling a steep boulder field toward Shannon Pass.

 Looking back down the Green River Valley. Those cliffs even remind me of the Book Cliffs north of Green River, Utah.

 Skirting the edge of Peak Lake.

 Starting the 2,000-foot climb up Knapsack Col. Here we met our first northbound CDT thru-hikers. They warned us of a tricky descent off the backside, and we could see weather forming on the pass. This especially made Meghan nervous, as she harbors a particularly sharp phobia of lightning. I'm also scared of electrical storms, but my greatest sources of terror in mountains are tricky descents in slippery, wet conditions.

 We worked to pick up the pace as best as we could, acknowledging that our not-quite-alpine start of 9:30 a.m. didn't serve us well. Above 11,000 feet I started to feel my airways tighten. I took a hit from my inhaler, which helped, but it was obvious that slow and steady is the only pace I have right now. We climbed increasingly steeper scree slopes as the sky darkened.

 The forbidding crest of Knapsack Col, elevation 12,280.

 Happily, rain and lightning held off, but the descent was indeed tricky — a 42-percent grade boulder field where the footing was anything but secure. Lora and Amber opted to walk/boot ski down the loose talus to the side of the boulder field, but I didn't feel confident enough in my balance to attempt this (a fall there had the potential to rip my pants, as one of the better outcomes.) Instead, I ended up in a minefield of extremely loose boulders, so I veered over to a snowfield to butt-slide. This proved to be a poor decision. From above, the snowfield appeared to end in scree, but in actuality the lower slope was glare ice covered in a thin layer of dirt. It was too steep and slippery to walk, and more sliding amid the ice-covered rocks would certainly rip up my pants — and likely the flesh on my butt and legs. With trekking poles still stashed in my pack, I had to balance my clown shoes on tiny protrusions of rocks, tip-toeing sideways toward the open scree slope, knowing any fall would result in torn-up legs — and I had already taken a lot of falls during this trip, on much easier terrain. It was nerve-wracking! Backpacking is stressful! But I made it without incident.

 Descending the talus amid the once-proud remnants of the Twins Glacier. The map I'd looked at before the trip made it look like the glacier filled the entire basin, enough so that I routed my GPS track around it, over a small pass and down a much steeper gully. (Meghan and Amber designed the loop, and I took their descriptions and created a GPS track that proved to be fairly accurate. This was a source of pride for me, as I'd drawn the track by looking at topo lines on an electronic map devoid of trails and names, and guessing the most logical route. Of course, I was the only one who cared, as I was the only one carrying a GPS.)

 Descending into the Titcomb Basin. The cold wind and rain finally picked up, and we shared a frigid lunch behind a boulder, shivering but starving. This was proving to be a tough 11 miles! Our day stretched out for nearly nine hours, and there wasn't even as much stopping as other days.

 Still, I'd be lying if I didn't admit there was lots of leisure. Even when things were a little cold and scary, we never failed to have lighthearted fun, giggling over the biceps of sleeveless climber boys and discussing all the ways Danni can condition her 17-month-old daughter to want to join her for a thru-hike of the CDT someday.

 Looking back at an imposing skyline — Mount Woodrow Wilson, The Sphinx, and Bonney Pass. This is just a few miles south of Gannett Peak, the highest mountain in Wyoming.


 We found a beautiful, secluded spot just below the lower Titcomb lake to set up camp for the next two nights.

 We kept it cozy.

It was a great breakfast spot. Every morning I ate oatmeal, a dollop of peanut butter, and coffee for breakfast. Lunch was salami and cheese on a tortilla, and dinner was Mountain House — a variety of the less-desired meals from the remnants of Beat's Iditarod stash. I also had lots of hot chocolate and tea — because what purpose is there to camping without hot drinks? What I brought far too much of was snacks. I couldn't even convince my friends to eat my granola bars, cookies and candy, even though Danni was only packing about 1,200 calories per day (she takes this Fat Camp thing seriously.)

On day four, we hoisted light packs for a day hike up Indian Basin.

 More boulder hopping. My quads and glutes were quite sore by day four, and I wished I had easier access to mountains like this. The Sierras are still reasonably far away from my home, but I'm pretty sure I'd at least lessen my clumsiness if I had more opportunities to develop mountain-specific fitness.

As you can see, it's hard not to spend the whole time looking up, which translates to tripping over things.

We climbed along the sad remnants of Harrower Glacier as we boulder-hopped our way to Indian Pass, at 12,200 feet on the Continental Divide.

On the pass, Danni found a cozy nook out of the cold.

 Lora and Amber found a high perch amid the blasting wind.

 Another group shot from Indian Pass.

The eastern Wind Rivers are almost entirely undeveloped wilderness, stranded between the Continental Divide and the Wind River Indian Reservation. In the Fitzpatrick Wilderness, most peaks and lakes are unnamed, there are very few trails, and tricky terrain and route-finding would keep one necessarily focused on the immediate present at all times — no cruiser daydreamy hiking here. Someday I would love to return to the Winds with ten days of food, a good map and compass, several self-made GPS tracks, real hiking boots, and the exuberance one can only feel while moving slowly and steadily through a truly wild place.

 Looking west again, a small tarn provides a splash of color beneath Knife Point Mountain. Still a wild place here, even on the popular side of the Divide.
 

Fremont Peak and flowers. So many flowers!

 In the evening, I went out for a stroll to take photos of the mountain paradise surrounding our camp.

 This place is just unreal.

On day five, all we had left to do was connect the loop.

 The previous day had been the only consistently sunny one, and rain returned for the last day. Overall, though, we lucked out with the weather — the only drenching rain came as we slept, and cold and lightning were minimal. As we hiked out, we heard reports of a massive storm approaching the area, set to bring heavy rain and snow to the higher elevations. Sure enough, as we drove away from Pinedale on Saturday, apocalyptic-looking clouds were approaching at breathtaking speeds.

"It looks like a Japanese painting," Danni said of the scenery as we raced raindrops out of the high country. We moved quickly to ensure enough time for hot-tubbing and copious amounts of fried food in Pinedale. It was a wonderful trip and a rare opportunity to get to know a fantastic region and a great group of women a little better. I'm a lucky girl to have had the chance to attend 2015 Fat Camp, even if I didn't lose any weight.

Thanks again, ladies! 

Getting my lungs back

After I left the Tour Divide, I spent the next week convalescing at my parents' house and feeling half dead. Temperatures in Salt Lake City were well into the 100s, and I could understand why weather services issue heat warnings for the elderly and infirmed. My body was so weak that I could barely cope with anything. I slept up to twelve hours a day, wheezed when I spoke, and became desperately winded while walking with my mother across a Target parking lot. An albuterol inhaler helped, but two different antibiotics didn't seem to do anything. After I returned to California, my doctor speculated I'd developed a viral pneumonia. My resting heart rate was still in the 90s, and he was alarmed that I'd damaged my heart. Several tests confirmed normal heart function, and enough time passed that concerns about pulmonary embolism also declined.

With its harsh symptoms and recovery, the "Tour Divide lung crud" is as sick as I've ever been. Admittedly I harbored jealousy about other Tour Dividers who bounced back from their respiratory illnesses as I struggled through a slow walk around the neighborhood, clutching an inhaler and frequently stopping to catch my breath on the day I'd hoped to finish the race. It's humbling to realize how quickly fitness can be reduced to zero, and this illness has been a reminder to never take health and vitality for granted. Physically moving through the world is my greatest source of joy, and it's also a gift that could be snatched away at any time, without warning.

I don't need to go into detail about how I spent the month of July, but it was a slow recovery that got a boost once I started running again. I wore a heart rate monitor and went for lethargic jogs. At first I couldn't breathe when my heart rate spiked to the high 130s. But before too long I didn't become winded until the 140s, and then the 150s. My usual tempo pace falls into the 160s, and I first achieved that about three weeks ago. Every run felt like an improvement to my lung health, while a couple of bike rides set me back. It was more difficult to control my exertion levels on the bike, and I had an asthma attack while mountain biking in Santa Cruz with my friend Jan. This prompted me to cancel a backpacking trip the following weekend, and I thought I would probably lose the rest of summer to the lung crud.

Still, I continued to make improvements with running, and boosted my mileage as I clung to hope for late summer adventures. I received an invitation to join friends on a five-day backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. Concerns about the altitude and other commitments prompted me to say no, but at the last minute I decided to go. It was a wonderful trip that I'll post about soon, but felt especially encouraged by a couple of outings in Salt Lake City that I tacked on at the end. It was just five weeks ago that I couldn't walk along a flat sidewalk without gasping. By Aug. 8, I felt strong enough to attempt Lone Peak.

Lone Peak is my childhood mountain. I used to gaze up at its higher slopes while walking to school. Looming over the southeastern corner of the Salt Lake Valley, Lone Peak is a broad massif with a prominent point 7,000 feet above the valley floor. If you start from the valley, you have to climb all of those 7,000 feet, and the loose-dirt trail that gains 1,200 feet per mile is the easy part. At 9,000 feet elevation the trail effectively ends, and the next 2,500 vertical feet entail difficult route-finding up a boulder-choked cirque, scrambling up rocky gullies and traversing a tricky knife ridge. I've summited Lone six or seven times in my life, and I forget how hard it is, every time.

Although it was 90 degrees in the valley, the air at 11,000 feet had a sharp bite. Still, the sky was clear, and there was almost no wind. I hesitated for long minutes over the tricky maneuvers of the knife ridge, trying to work up the nerve to wedge my Hokas into a crack or swing my whole body over a yawning couloir while clinging to an overhanging slab. My heart continued to beat steadily, as though it understood that adrenaline spikes might trigger a breathing attack that would not help the situation. I was surprised how easy it was to breathe up here. For weeks my lungs felt as though they were clogged with silt. For lack of a real medical explanation, the silt analogy is the best I have. Tight airways forced shallow breathing, but slight increases in effort seemed to help break up the "blockage." Progress was so gradual I hardly noticed, but this day was the first my lungs felt almost clear. I scrambled onto the table-sized boulder that forms Lone Peak, steadied my legs to stand amid the dizzying drops on all four sides, took a deep breath, and smiled. Then I quickly dropped back to squatting position, because damn, this peak is exposed.

After nine hours of steep hiking and scrambling on Sunday — not to mention the five days in the Wind Rivers before that — my legs were sore and creaky on Monday morning. But my lungs felt great, which is basically the same as being well-rested. I still had eight hours to kill before I needed to be at the airport, so I joined my dad for a nice jaunt up Mount Raymond and Gobbler's Knob, two 10,200-foot peaks in the heart of the Wasatch.

Dad said Mount Raymond was a bit of a scramble. It was fun scrambling, of course, and not too exposed. But my hamstrings felt shredded from lots of over-stretching on Lone Peak, and my legs were covered in cuts and bruises from less-than-graceful maneuvers. Breathing, however, remained steady. I was thrilled. What a gift this is — the ability to move through the world.

I won't take this for granted again. 

The last good day

I wrote about day eleven of the Tour Divide a month ago in the post, "On not letting go."  I promised myself that vignette was going to be the only thing I publicly wrote about the experience, but I've never been able to stick with resolutions to cut back on blogging. Rehashing each day over the past month has been cathartic, as it usually is (catharsis is 85 percent of the reason I continue to update this blog after ten long years.)

Day twelve dawned hopeful, as I rose from a patch of sage about 28 miles north of Wamsutter, Wyoming, where I'd effectively passed out after sleepily crashing my bike the previous evening. I'd pedaled 162 miles the previous day without an asthma attack, and I put most of the Great Divide Basin behind me. Watching the Northern Lights shimmering above this vast desert was one of the more incredible experiences of my life — even though I wasn't yet convinced the display wasn't just a vivid hallucination. (It was real. A severe magnetic storm on June 22 brought the strongest Aurora Borealis displays in more than a decade. Just one day after the summer solstice, far-northern latitudes were too bright to witness them. But they were quite spectacular in southern Wyoming.) Also, I'd come up with a plan to cope with my wheezy, winded status quo. The plan revolved around even lower exertion — I'd soft-pedal into dusty headwinds and walk steeper climbs. I probably wouldn't be that much slower because, well, I hadn't been that much slower.

The ride into Wamsutter was uneventful, and I reached the I-80 exit town just before 9 a.m. There was a Love's truck stop that turned out to not be a great resupply place. (They didn't have sunscreen. Who doesn't have sunscreen? Also, faster Tour Dividers had cleaned them out of all their string cheese. Boo.) But they did have fresh melon and a Subway, and anywhere I could get cheap coffee in the morning was perfect by my standards. Mike and Marketa rolled in at about 9:30 and left first, while I was outside next to a gas pump cleaning my bike with the free paper towels. I purposely waited about five more minutes for a gap to form, because I was feeling especially self-conscious about my slow pace. Mike and Marketa might encourage me to ride with them, and trying to keep up would be a sure ticket to breathing attacks.

South of town, this Tour Divide alternative to the GDMBR cut through the heart of hydraulic fracking country, with huge trucks and semi-trailers streaming through a veritable tunnel of dust. I managed to get behind a truck that was traveling at eight miles an hour — slower even than me! — and dampening down one side of the road with a water spray. This would have been a good thing for me, but trucks on the other side of the wide gravel road were kicking up even more dust as they moved into the shoulder, and the spray itself had a weird chemical smell that burned in my sinuses and throat. There was no way around the water truck without spiking my heart rate, and I could already feel my lungs closing.

About six miles past town, I stopped, looked back and thought, "Well this is it. I'm going back to Wamsutter."

But then I thought, "No, I can't quit here. Not here. Not so close to Colorado." I was convinced Colorado would save me.

This is a new section of the Tour Divide route, so it was all unknown to me. Once you pass through Wamsutter, you think you've got the hard part of the Great Divide Basin over with, but that isn't the case at all. Although you're no longer in the geographical boundary of the Basin, the shadeless sage desert continues for sixty more miles, all of the creeks are little more than patches of stagnant muddle puddles with a thick oil sheen, and fracking traffic remains heavy on dusty dirt roads. We were given cues for this section but not warned that there were no viable water sources for sixty miles. I'd planned to get water out of one of those nonexistent creeks, but luckily I am a water hoarder and left Wamsutter with nearly four liters plus two bottles of juice. Marketa wasn't so lucky and ran out of fluid fairly early in the day. I managed to catch Mike and Marketa about fifteen miles south of Wamsutter, and she was struggling.

Mike and Marketa were an interesting duo. Mike was in his 50s, from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, with this laid back attitude that would convince you nothing was ever hard for him. He was an Ironman triathlete who only recently took up long-distance cycling, and bikepacking was especially new to him. He was one of those guys who watched "Ride the Divide" and thought, "Hey, I could do that," and a year later he was riding the Tour Divide at a strong pace. Marketa was just 20 years old, from the Czech Republic, and quite chipper all the time even when she was hurting. Through the communication barrier I only learned a little about her, but Mike told me she was a semi-pro mountain biker who won races in the Czech Republic.

"How did you two hook up?" I asked Mike.

Mike told me they'd leap-frogged for several days before she finally latched onto him two days earlier. Their paces were well-matched, and she seemed very happy to have someone to talk with. I gathered that Mike also didn't understand everything Marketa said to him, but seemed to be a good sport about being on the receiving end when Marketa was feeling chatty.

"Sometimes, you know, you just need to let a woman talk," he said to me knowingly. I laughed.

I enjoyed Mike and Marketa's company, and I'd stop whenever they stopped, which became more frequent as Marketa struggled without fluid on this hot, dry afternoon. Both Mike and I offered her water, but she wouldn't take it. These days, Tour Divide rules explicitly forbid accepting support from anyone — even another racer — along the trail. I admired Marketa's integrity, but the experience led me to ponder why the bikepacking community has chosen to go down this road in competitive events. The sport was pioneered from a self-supported, Fastest Known Time / Individual Time Trail standpoint. These routes can be challenged any time, and those who don't decide to line up for the "race" don't have the advantage of other riders present on the course. From a fairness standpoint, it makes sense that competitors can't share something as simple as a swig of water or a candy bar. Still — these contrivances to pretend you're all alone out there are often confusing. I chatted with others who were frequently unsure what constituted "support" — one questioned whether taking advantage of a bike shop that stayed open after closing hours was unfair, and another believed that visiting a medical clinic was not allowed under the rules. I got the sense that many people felt like they were riding on egg shells, with the SPOTs tracking their every move, and everything they did was open to misinterpretation. There aren't easy solutions to keeping this kind of self-supported, self-policed race format fair without tightening rules to encourage solitude. But I still think it's unfortunate that in an aggressively competitive ultramarathon like UTMB I can offer aid to a fellow racer, but on a weeks-long adventure like the Tour Divide, I have to stand back while another person suffers, and do nothing.

After battling a series of steep rolling hills that the road just shot straight up and down, the three of us stopped together in Savery, Wyoming, where someone from the local museum left a cooler of water out on a picnic table. Mike and I debated whether this constituted illegal support, but I argued that this was here for everyone, and even if it wasn't, we could just walk into the museum bathroom and get water there. Once we got the ethics debate out of the way, we all enjoyed the water thoroughly. I remembered that I had camped at this museum before, during my bike tour from Salt Lake City to Syracuse, New York, in 2003. Back then we set up our tents on the lawn and played with a stray cat, who I ended up giving the tuna I planned to eat for lunch the following day, because she looked hungrier than I'd ever be. "2003, huh? You really are an old-timer," Mike said to me, and I smiled. I've been a bike tourist for nearly 14 years now, and it's a major part of my personal history. There's really nothing better than traveling by bike.

I sure was excited to see this sign. Wyoming was done! My suffering was over! Of course it's ridiculous to believe that an end can be drawn by something as arbitrary as a state line, but this is the kind of mentality we foster in efforts like the Tour Divide. It's too huge to conceptualize the big picture, so we compartmentalize it into what are ultimately arbitrary pieces. "I you can make it to Butte, you can finish." "Once you leave Montana, the hardest days of climbing are behind you." "Once I escape Wyoming, all the dust is going to magically settle, my lungs are going to clear up, and I will fly!"

For tonight, I had the Brush Mountain Lodge to anticipate. Brush Mountain was my only real carrot on the route. In 2009, the proprietor of the lodge, Kirsten, walked outside and flagged me down at 10:30 at night when I was in a particularly dark emotional space. She invited me inside, fed me fresh fruit, offered a warm bed, and more than anything else, was a kind and understanding voice when I needed a friend. Of all the "support" I enjoyed in 2009, the Brush Mountain Lodge was one that truly made all the difference. I couldn't wait to go back. "I just need to make it to Brush Mountain," I had decided before the start, "and I'm as good as there."

The 23-mile climb from Savery was a grinder, and although the scenery was beautiful and I was stoked to be in Colorado, the struggles mounted early. Soon my lungs were constricting and I stopped in a cloud of mosquitoes to try to take in more water. Gasping led to panic, and this ignited another good session of bawling. I actually cried for the better part of twenty minutes, mashing pedals and gasping between sobs because this really wasn't helping with my breathing difficulties, but the mosquitoes were too thick for me to stop. I couldn't even tell you why I was so upset. Maybe I was crying because it was hard. It was just too hard. I was finally coming around to the truth that my weakened body and lungs wouldn't be able to sustain this effort, not for a thousand miles or a hundred. No amount of patience or persistence could save my race. I understood, but not out loud. Only in sobs.

I arrived at Brush Mountain just after sunset, to the customary warm reception. Mike and Marketa were there, and Kirsten was cooking up cheeseburgers for everyone. She asked about my ride and I raved about the beautiful sunset, the northern lights I'd witnessed the previous night, and all of my memories of this scenic valley and our first meeting six years ago. When coughing erupted, I tried to tamp it down with the big jug of ice water on the table. I was so incredibly happy. Even though I'd been so sad just minutes earlier, I'd gotten that emotional gunk out of my system and swung around to renewed optimism. It was going to be all right. It was all going to be all right.

That night, I posted my daily report to Facebook: "Sunburn. Dozens of mosquito bites. Lungs filled with dust. The physical challenges of the divide have been quite different this time around, and I'm not even quite sure how to battle what seems to be a worsening allergic reaction. But I made it to Brush Mountain Lodge, and it feels like coming home."