Tuesday August 26, 24.0mi/38.6km

Pine Creek CG (x/6580ft) to Mary’s River TH (1204.0/6390ft) (NV)

I was excited to be in the mountains again, and it was a lovely morning of hiking on nice trails. I started off on some 4wd roads.

Pretty quickly, I hit the Wilderness boundary and I was on singletrack trail for the rest of the day.

My task for the morning was to climb up to a pass at 9,800 ft elevation, following the Jarbidge River. It was amazing to be able to appreciate all the views, in Idaho I would have been focused on not losing the vague trail.

Pretty soon I was up in the alpine climate, not much was growing up here.

I hadn’t looked closely at my map so I was surprised to see a tiny little alpine lake near the pass.

Apparently that was Jarbidge Lake. As I was climbing the final few switchbacks up to the 9800-ft pass, I noticed the clouds were moving in more thickly.

I came over the past and I saw that Cougar Peak to the North had already been swallowed by clouds.

And also Mary’s River Peak to the South. It was really cool watching all the clouds swirl around the mountaintops, and it really gives the scale of the mountain some context. I dropped down a tiny bit into a small valley, where I was able to refill my water.

Even way up here in the remotest part of the Wilderness, I was surprised to find nice trail.

Mary’s River Peak was absolutely swallowed in clouds, good thing I was going over the pass just to the left. Someone really took some time to delineate the trails up here.

I kept coming across large piles of poop, some poor animal was having a bad day. I’m not sure what the nature version of Taco Bell is.

I hiked over the final pass and started dropping down into the valley, and then it started to rain. Hard. I didn’t take any pictures for a couple hours, it was just too wet. Just before I dropped into the East Fork Mary’s River, the rain stopped and I had some nice views of the forest I was descending into.

I love these little Aspen forests, usually because they mean water and shade, although today both of those things are plentiful.

As I dropped lower into the valley, I could smell sheep. And then I saw them, hundreds of them.

They were quite curious, and a few would follow me at a distance. A mile later I came upon the shepherd with his dogs, he asked “¿ovejas?” and pointed uphill to where I had just come from. I answered his questions with a few sentences in Spanish with lots of details. He looked confused, and replied in a language that definitely wasn’t Spanish. And then I realized he was probably speaking Basque, and ovejas is one of the few words that overlap with Spanish. Oops. Once I got down to the Mary’s River Valley, the clouds had started to come back with rain.

The last couple hours of the day were right along the Mary’s River, which I had pictured being in a forest, but it was all hiking in sagebrush.

The last hour, the rain stopped and the sun was trying to come out but never quite did. Every time I had to cross the river, I had to hike through a wall of big leafy plants, which of course were soaked from the rain. Bleh. I made it to the trailhead by 6 pm, and just threw down my tent at the closest flat spot, I just wanted to get in my tent and be dry. It was an absolutely beautiful day of hiking but I could have done without the afternoon rainstorms.