The Unlucky and Infatuated

July 12, 2007 (Continued yet again....)

We anxiously awaited Zach’s return, which came about 15 minutes later. He walked quickly down the trail and rejoined our group to answer my questions. Andrew was all right; he’d decided to follow a water route back to the Moss Creek campsite and had gone the way alone. He was now reunited with his party and eating lunch at the campsite picnic table.

I took the time to rant and say things like, “What an idiot to separate from the group and go alone through unknown parts!” before the most important question, the answer to which I’d wanted so badly to know for the past 2 days, reoccurred to me.

“Did they make it to Fairyland?” I asked, thinking I already knew the answer. Zach would have made sure to start his dialogue with that detail, had it been in the affirmative.

Zach shook his head and smiled. “No, they didn’t,” he said.

This information obviously required a full account of Andi’s travels, so we packed up our stuff again and headed toward their group.

Andi and Company sat round the picnic table, and I made sure to note the form of Andrew, who had indeed found his expedition members.

No prodding was necessary to obtain the whole story from Andi, who told of their adventures with help from Pilar, who showed off the network of scratches left by copious amounts of bushwhacking. It seemed that their group had elected to follow Broad Creek into the basin. The route had begun easily enough, and Andi described it as “following the Yellow Brick Road.” The rocks in the creek had appeared yellow and the water had been shallow and slow enough to be manageable.... until it gave way to the first of 4 waterfalls along its length. They made it to the second, and then, finding the way too treacherous (Pilar used phrases like “clung to rocks” and “almost died”), had deemed it wise to turn around. Andi calculated, upon their return to Canyon, that they’d been a scant ¼ mile from the basin when they stopped.

We expressed our condolences, and then I asked about the 4B1 campsite. We’d been told time and time again that it was ridiculously hard to find, and directions that I had elicited from Chase during the course of our conversation earlier that morning had produced a picture vastly different from the one conveyed by the backcountry rangers.

Andi assured us that it wasn’t hard to find, and advised us to locate the massive set of elk antlers on an island in the middle of Broad Creek, and from there to follow the creek. The campsite couldn’t be easily missed, since Andi had taken the time to upright the fallen marker along the creek.

“There are also little hot pools right by the campsite,” she said. “I can’t understand why they’d put the campsite so close to them, that doesn’t seem safe to me. You’ll want to be careful if you go to the bathroom at night!”

She also told how Steven hadn’t noticed the little pools till they’d been about to leave, and remarked that she couldn’t believe he hadn’t accidentally fallen into one.

So, with my mind forming new horrific visions of nighttime burns that would kill me before I could ever hope to reach the burn centre at Salt Lake (I’ve got an overactive imagination), I took my leave, along with my two companions. Zach had been eagerly anticipating the bushwhacking and orienteering on the day’s agenda and could no longer be denied the fun, so we left our companions for the vast and unknown spaces of the woods....