I had found another incredibly comfortable campsite. Shady but not too cool, free of both wind and condensation. I slept right through my alarm and woke up about 7. After taking some time in the woods to ensure I wouldn’t have to stop a couple of miles in, I started hiking about 9am.
The sun was out for a pleasant morning even though the trail ahead was mostly uphill, or, once up on the ridge, a lot of up and down. I passed a sobo who said the trail ahead was a lot of scree, not very fun. The climb up Windy Peak was indeed strewn with rocks, but there was dirt between the rocks. It wasn’t like walking through a rock slide, and it wasn’t that bad other than the warm uphill pull.
The last 30 miles or so of trail south of Monarch Pass is multi-use, and I saw no shortage of fat tire mountain bikers coming past. A group of them was stopped at a trail junction about lunchtime and we traded photos. We were all trying to figure out when it would start raining for real since there was a bit of rain happening as we chatted. A little past there, I stopped at a campsite to make my own lunch. It did rain a bit, but it was enough to drape my Packa over me and my pack and prep surface.
From there it was mostly downhill into Marshall Pass, a place I was looking forward to because there was a cabin there and comments suggested it had solar power. Since my phone battery and mobile battery were both very low, I thought I could spend an hour recharging from the sun. I found the cabin no item, but the only thing the solar cell could power was a strip of LEDs hardwired into it. There was a battery powered lantern inside, but it had no USB ports. The cabin had a really nice smelling privy nearby at least.
Luckily, there was an extended family parked down the road watching a bull moose graze its easy across the meadow. While they pinned it down with binoculars and telly lenses, I borrowed a mobile battery and got my charge from 18% up to 35%. They let me try out the binoculars too.
When they left, I returned to the cabin, from which I could see the trail. Rather than return to the road to go back to the pass and then catch the trail, I took a shortcut across the muddy marsh between the cabin and the trail. My shoes got pretty caked, but there was a clear running stream coming under the road through a culvert just up the road around a couple of switchbacks, so I just stepped in there and got them relatively clean.
The trail from here started out as a proper road but the road soon ended and became a proper single track. For the first time in a while, I emerged from the trees onto an alpine hillside with a view. Of course, this meant I was out in the wind again, so I zipped up into my Packa. I passed an older lady hiking back to her car at Marshall Pass just as another sunshower was starting. She let me know about the water and camping situation ahead–I was only a mile or so from a proper shelter!–and I let her know about the cabin she could stay in if she got to her car too late to drive home.
I passed the piped spring on my way to the shelter, but I didn’t know if I needed water and I was too buttoned up against the steadily falling rain to stop and undo everything anyway. A third of a mile later, I was at the shelter. There were two younger guys there waiting out the rain at the end of a day hike. I started getting things out to cook supper as we chatted and the rain turned to hail. But even before I got as far as lighting the stove, the sun came out and they took off just like that. I had the shelter to myself.
I still had some daylight after finishing supper (during which I made my bed on the shelter’s dirt “floor”), and I was out of water after allotting what I would need for breakfast, so I decided to run back to the piped spring with my filter bag. Twenty minutes later, when I returned, there were a couple of mule deer bucks right at the shelter. I don’t know what they were doing, but I did startle them. They didn’t go far though–they wandered around the woods in front of the shelter for another half hour. I bedded down to the sound of bucks cropping at the grass only twenty feet away.
Trail miles: 14.6
Distance to Monarch: 6.7 miles
moose 
the muddy marsh I just crossed 
