Wednesday, May 01, 2019 – 6.80 miles
I opened my tent doors this morning to see blue sky. Hurray! The walk to Lake Hughes Road was uneventful, except that I ran into the second hiker who I had sat with at McDonalds. I interrogated her about the Mt. Baden-Powell area and which detour she had taken for the endangered species trail closure (it’s useless asking people how bad the snow is because of varying standards, but I still do).
Reaching the road around noon, I paused to consider walking or hitching to town. Since I hadn’t been planning to stop at Hikertown, I had sent my bounce box to/planned to resupply at Lake Hughes, 2.3 miles from the trail. The road was almost deserted and I calculated that if I didn’t get a ride, it would mean 7+ miles of walking and a rushed town visit, since there’s no camping in Lake Hughes and I don’t want to pay for the hotel. I decided to take an on-trail nero today and walk to town tomorrow morning.
I spent the afternoon watching the various birds and insects in a wash near the road. I saw one of the usual black beetles eating a plant, and ants building an anthill, and a Costa’s hummingbird landed on a branch only a few metres away.
I found a place to cowboy camp on the wash. A wild mosquito appeared! One mosquito. It did the same pitiful job as AZT mosquitoes, landing on my sleeping bag, my tent, droning suspiciously or cluelessly nearby, retreating at the movement of one of my fingers, never receiving any reinforcements, and eventually got squashed. The Diamond Peak Wilderness mosquitoes would have cannibalized that mosquito as a disgrace to their kind, then buzzed off to gorge themselves on hiker blood.
