Hike with Me: Stump Lake

By Jeanne Bustamante

A solo hike gives a person a lot of time to think. During an overnight solo hike over Labor Day weekend in 2013, Jeanne Bustamante found herself thinking of her mother.

No matter how much Jeanne wanted to share the experience of the hike, the backpacking, the views of wild Idaho forests and occasional wildlife, with her mother, it couldn't happen. Her mother uses a wheelchair and a walker, and cannot be outside in the heat. She has Multiple Sclerosis, and Jeanne could never bring her on a backpacking trip.

Hike with Me: Stump Lake brings the trail to her.

It is an account of a solo hike from a woman who still considers herself a beginning backpacker, told for her mother, who has never backpacked, and never will. Jeanne begins with an explanation for the lay person of what backpacking entails for her, and continues with pictures and written descriptions of how the overnight solo hike to Stump Lake, near Donnelly, ID, went.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to the National MS Society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeanne Bustamante
• Release date: Sep 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311626837

Book preview

Hike with Me

Stump Lake

by Jeanne Bustamante

Boise, ID

© 2014 by Jeanne Bustamante

All rights reserved.

All photos by author unless otherwise noted.

This book is an account of one hiker’s experience, and does not constitute instruction or guidance.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Part 1: Be Prepared

Part 2: The Journey

About the Author

Foreword

I'm writing this book for my mom. She's never been backpacking, and she will never get the chance to do it now. She has Multiple Sclerosis, and issues of temperature, mobility and care would get in the way. Even if she ever does get to visit me here in Idaho, she’ll never be able to experience it the way I love best: out in the mountains, far from where cars can travel, and far away from where tourists usually congregate.

Over Labor Day weekend 2013, I went on a solo hike. Technically, it was my second solo hike. I did one in 2012, but a 2½ mile out-and-back to a popular hot spring is significantly different from a 12 mile thru-hike in areas where I’ve never encountered other people and off road vehicles are forbidden. This solo hike felt like a first. There were miles that I needed to get done if I wanted to make it, and turning around for help would quickly be just as difficult as continuing forward.

As I walked, I tried not to think about how much I missed my husband’s presence. Even when I’m hiking ahead of him, I know he’s there, somewhere. I know I can rely on him, and rely on the gear and the knowledge that he carries. So I thought about my mom as my steps carried me farther away from my starting point. It would be a hassle just to get her to the trailhead in some ways, let alone up there. I could probably push the wheelchair to the second creek, but that’s less than a mile, and while off road vehicles do travel the path, it isn’t what I would call accommodating for a standard wheelchair.

I had planned on taking lots of pictures, because on the other trips that summer I had found myself wanting more when I wrote blog entries about them. I was kicking myself for not taking pictures of any number of scenes that I wanted to use later. So this time, I was going to go crazy and document as much as I could stand, while still going fast enough to challenge myself. The idea of putting those pictures into a book, and writing about the experience of hiking the trail was born between steps. As I carried my supplies and gear up into the mountains to spend the night alone, I thought of my mother, who would never see where my steps could take me. Unless I showed it to her.

So this book is for you, Mom. I hope you enjoy it, and know that I think of you.

Part 1: Be Prepared

When I was in college, I went on a weekend rafting trip. I had so little experience camping that I thought that the sleeping pad was the same thing as the sleeping bag, and only brought the pad. My night was cold and miserable, and it would be eight years before I went camping again.

Luckily for me, I was now with someone who not only had a great deal of experience camping, but also knew that I didn’t. My husband, and backpacking partner, Ambrose, examined my gear, questioning what I was packing, and what I wasn’t, before we left the house. We spoke at length about what kinds of gear I would need, what kind of gear I might want, and the difference between the two. In the years since, I’ve learned what I need, and how to decide if what I want is worth it for a particular trip, but you’ve never been backpacking Mom, or even hiking, so I’m going to tell you about the gear that I took, and why.

Initially, the idea of backpacking made me think of gear as only what was packed into a pack, but the experience of backpacking has taught me that every item that I carry on my body, from underwear on out, is a part of my gear. I consider each piece of clothing on the basis of what it will do for me, how much it weighs, and whether it can be replaced by something better. Do I really need two pairs of underwear? Not for just one night.

In the beginning, I had no idea how much stuff I would need, and want, to take with me to go backpacking. I know there are varying levels of need and want—one person’s essential is another person’s excess weight, especially when you start talking about ultra-light-weight backpacking. Maybe someday I’ll be at the point where I want to start trying that, but for now, I have a certain minimum of creature comforts that I choose to call my requirements. After all, technically, I could have gone without a tent with the warm weather we’d been having that summer, and hot food is, to some, a luxury on the trail.

Ambrose started me out with the ten essentials, which is a list compiled by an outdoor education non-profit group called The Mountaineers. The version we use was first published in the 7th edition of Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, now in its 8th edition. It’s kind of funny that they call it the ten essentials. It isn’t exactly ten items—it’s more like ten categories of items that are considered essential rather than ten exact items. In fact, this version of the list is ten essential systems. For example, one essential is sunscreen and sunglasses. That’s two items. Or first aid, which can vary depending on what you think you’ll encounter and how much risk you’re willing to take. There’s only so much you can do in the wilderness when it comes to first aid. From what I’ve read, the main goal in most serious injury situations is evacuation to a proper medical facility. I hope we never have to use the razor wire that Ambrose has carried for years in his first aid kit, but it’s there, which means that if we ever end up in a catastrophic situation (such as the one that befell hiker Aron Ralston), then we won’t have to hack off the trapped limb with a cheap pocket knife. Any amputations would be quick.

The first essential system is navigation, which they define as a map and compass. I’ve been having trouble learning how to read topographic maps (Figure A), despite Ambrose’s efforts to teach me, or maybe because of them. When you try too hard, sometimes it inhibits learning instead of facilitating it. Sometimes, I would stare at the map, the lines spiraling and swirling in my vision until I felt cross-eyed, and I would think that I had it—the lines define contours, the contours show where the elevations change. In Idaho, the elevations change a lot, but the landscape doesn’t always resemble the simple lines that the map displays. The terrain has trees, and the trees aren’t a uniform height. I get frustrated when I look across an area and I know where I am, I know what it is supposed to look like, and it doesn’t look the way I think it should. How can I tell if I’m looking into a flat space or a valley hidden by trees?

Ambrose’s solution to my difficulty with maps has been to help me less this year. Instead of being the navigator, he’s let me take the lead. So I’ve gotten better at reading maps this summer, and at finding myself. So much so that I managed to find the Snowslide Lakes and Ambrose missed them even though he was following my footprints (or maybe because he was following my footprints—I’ll admit, I overshot and turned back, but he overshot my overshoot).

The trail for my solo hike was one that Ambrose and I have done since the summer we started backpacking, but this would be the very first time that either of us had ever hiked it all the way through. Usually we started at one end and turned back. I would be starting at one end and then going all the way to the other, where Ambrose would be anxiously awaiting my arrival. I knew this trail pretty well.

For a while I was using Ambrose’s old compass, a standard kind of manual compass, but this summer he bought us an electronic one. It’s a compass/altimeter/barometer (Figure B), which also has the time, a timer, a stopwatch, alarms, an elevation tracker and various ways to track and display various statistics. I’m not sold on the altimeter yet, even if it did help me find the Snowslide Lakes, because it hasn’t actually given me confidence. The readings vary, sometimes widely, from what I expect based on the map, and it can change rather drastically even when I’m standing still. The compass works nicely, but it’s a little weird to have the directional degrees display so exactly, and it doesn’t seem like I have to turn it very far to get a different reading. Essentially, it’s weird that I’m not turning around a stationary needle, but instead getting a reading whenever I angle it in a different direction.

But this altimeter-barometer is a new thing, and I’m still getting used to it. My experience with a traditional compass has resulted in some success, but mostly failure, in trying to do things like triangulate my position on a map based on landmarks. It seems like I’m never right in deciding which landmarks correspond to the landmarks on the map. It isn’t easy for me, so I have to keep