So, we're about six miles or so from our base camp, and right knee is less than functional. To get back, there were a few tricky sections where we had to reverse a few boulder problems. Basically, I climbed down the rope while trying hard not to bend my knee any. (Ouch!)

After we got back on the trail, however, things got easier. I couldn't walk fast, but the trail is pretty flat, so we managed to make it back before dark. Here's a shot of me walking home over a really manky looking pile of rubble:

At this point, things are clearly not looking too great. My knee is now almost completely rigid, so getting back up to the top of the Maze will not be trivial. The trail, you may recall, is pretty intense for a hiking trial. Granted, Mark could get up any one section and drop a rope for me, but there isn't always a place for him to belay from. Some of that friction climbing is going to be difficult with snow covering it, and there's not any obvious way for Mark to protect a long, snow covered friction traverse unless there are handy cracks every so often.

I didn't sleep much that night. I spent most of it worrying about how bad each section of the trail that I could remember would be when covered with snow. Of course, while I'd brought my 2m ham radio, it would be useless until we got out of the canyon. Even then, it might not work. This place is remote!

Mark, on the other hand, was pretty confident that we'd make it up. That helped.

So, that night, we cooked a small meal. (We were running low on food, too.) I patched up my knee with a funky combination of duct tape and an ace bandage to try to keep my patella in one place. The bike pump made a good splint. (Frame pump)

The next morning, we woke up a bit before dawn to pack up the camp. Mark, of course, took all the climbing gear. I took mostly light stuff. Since I got the lightweight stuff, I obviously took the junky backpack. (I'd dream about Mark's big pack sitting in the trunk of our rental car for the next few days. That army thing is horrible!)

Up we went. It's very fortunate that Mark is a great guy, because I was slow! He'd drop a rope from the top of anything even remotely difficult, we'd haul up all our stuff, and then I'd climb up the rope hand over hand. The lowest point of the whole trip (for me, anyway) occured about midway up the trail. There was some of that feared snow-covered friction where Mark couldn't arrange a place to belay me from. (He needs a good spot, since I weigh so much.) Part way up that, my knee poped out again. (Fortunately, the ace bandage/duct tape poped it right back in place.) For what seemed like 5 minutes or so, I just lay in the snow waiting for the pain to subside. Eventually, I crawled up the where Mark was. "Pathetic", was Mark's verdict when I reached him.

He ment that in the nicest possible way, of course. :)

Well, that further dislocation slowed me down even more, but most of the hard stuff was over. We made it up the 1 mile trail in about 3 or 4 hours. Here's a few photos from the climb:

Now it was time to hop on our bikes and get the hell out of there. There wasn't too much snow at the trail head, so, as long as I could figure out how to bike, things looked pretty good. Biking, it turned out, wasn't too bad. I couldn't bend my knee significantly, so I raised the seat well beyond that little line marked "Don't raise the seat past here", and I duct taped and p-corded some additional padding on the top of the seat, too. That raised my butt enough that I could just spin my right pedal mostly by moving my ankle. I removed the toe clip, too, so that I didn't have to figure out how to do that.

Alas, things were not that easy. The drifts rapidly got deeper, and, by the time we'd gotten around to the other side of the Elaterite Butte, the snow was one or two feet deep. We'd often have to get off and haul the bikes by hand. That really sucked over soft sand, and Mark, who had all the heavy climbing gear, was having serious problems.

My brakes had already been destroyed going down the Flint Trail switchbacks, so I just disconnected my brakes. Mark, however, had problems with snow accumulating in his brakes. We'd gone MTBing in the snow a bit back in New York, but not deep snow! These annoyances were all new to us.

Well, it was inevitable. By the time we'd gotten to the intersection of the Flint Trail and the Maze Overlook road we decided to abandon gear. (Look for the intersection of the North Trail/Canyon Trail and the Flint Trail.) We made a big, obvious pile of all our biking and climbing gear. I'll guess there was 3 or 4 kilobucks in that pile.

The rangers had warned us that, every so often, they got a lot of snow. They told us stories of them getting trapped for months in the ranger station with no way to drive out. We now thought when we got back to the ranger station, we'd be stuck up there until the snow melted. Then we'd hike back in and pick up our stuff. Thoughts of us being forced to stay at the ranger station for a few months kept us entertained for a while.

At this point, we had a choice. We could walk back the way we came. This was about a 30 mile hike or so, but it wasn't a hard hike. (Except for the snow, anyway.) The other choice is to go by the North Trail/Canyon Trail. This is a more direct route, but it involves crossing some nasty sections. In addition, we'd found in the past that the snow could very easily cover up the kairns. If that were the case, I was pretty confident that I wouldn't be able to get up the steep sections without my right knee. Hiking all the way up to the end of the canyon and back would take pretty much all of our food, so we wouldn't have been able to make a second try. We decided to take the safe but slow route and hike the way we'd come.

Mark was exhausted from trying to use the bikes through the snow, so we stopped earlier than we'd hoped that night. (A few miles before the switchbacks.) He was also very cold. I was wearing liner socks and nice, thick wool socks under my running shoes, but Mark just had some polypro socks. Mark was getting close to a case of frostbite, so we quit with a little bit of sun left.

At this point, I should should explain that I've got type I diabetes. (That's the juvenile form.) This may seem irrelevant, but Mark was worried about how I would deal with running out of food. We didn't have nearly enough, you see, and neither of us wanted to run completely out of it. To a large extent, I could compensate for reduced rations by taking less insulin (a lot less insulin!), but Mark wasn't completely confident in my ability to do that. (Okay, he had justification. It turned out that I managed pretty well, but he had reason to doubt. I've screwed up in dangerous places in the past.)

The point of that aside was that Mark had not been eating much to try to save more food for me. (Nice guy!) However, after we set up camp, he started showing symptoms of hypoglycemia. Most significantly, he started getting hypothermia. Even jumping in your -30 degree down bag with your down jacket and lite-loft pants on can't warm you up if you have no calories to burn. Fortunately, Mark had been warming up a powerbar in his pocket, and he soon warmed up after eating that. However, things were a bit scary for a while.

However, we were still alive, and it still looked as though we'd make it out. We entertained ourselves with stories about how we'd entertain ourselves at the ranger station while waiting for the snow to melt. My knee wasn't in such bad shape. I could bend it just barely enough to posthole through the snow. If my knee stiffened up in the middle of the night, I probably wouldn't make it out, so I made sure I lay with it in a bent position. Occationally, I'd bend it back and forth to keep it stretched. Neither of us actually slept.

The next morning, we had to warm up our shoes over the stove in order to get them on. They were solid blocks of ice. Getting my right shoe on took about half an hour! Sometimes, minor things can be incredibly frustrating. We had melted about 3 liters of water the night before. Mark, intelligently, had drunk about half that during the night. (Or at least when I wasn't watching!) I was fairly dehydrated in the morning.

What we should have done at that point was melt more snow. However, I wasn't actually thirsty, I just wasn't urinating at all, so it didn't seem all that serious. Instead, I managed to go the whole day without drinking more than a liter. Bad move...

That day, we were going to hike up the switchbacks and get into the Gordon Flats. We thought that if we hiked a bit into the night, we might even make it back to the ranger station. Unfortunately, dehydration causes your muscles to lose efficiency. I wasn't able to keep a very good pace going. Going up the switchbacks, I had to stop and rest every so often. We did try melting a bit of snow by putting snow in zip-lock bags and keeping it close to our skin, but we didn't have a whole lot of bags left, so we couldn't get much. My bag even had a leak in it, so Mark got more out of that trick than I did.

Here's a few shots of the Flint Trail. You really aught to compare them to the "before" shots that we took earlier, so I've stuck both the new and the old photos here:

Before:	After:

At any rate, by about 2:00, I was close to collapsing. I wanted to stop right there. Mark was about to argue with me, but he says that after turning around and looking at me, he knew I wasn't kidding. I managed to piss for the first time in more than a day shortly after setting up camp. It was bright red.

So, we weren't going to joke around this time. We were having a miserable time out there, but that didn't mean we couldn't enjoy an afternoon off. We were going to make a good camp. We had plenty of sunlight and warmth left, so we set up a big fire. This was illegal even outside of the national park, but if the ranger wanted to drive up and arrest us, that was fine with us!

At some point that day, Mark's First Need water filter had broken, so we couldn't filter any of the water we melted on the fire. That was okay. I still drank more than 5 liters of the sooty water that afternoon. We made sure all of our water bottles were filled for the next day, too. Not only that, but we dried out our shoes and socks. I was confident that tomorrow we'd make it back to the ranger station, so I was pretty happy. Mark was still a bit worried. He wasn't convinced that my extreme fatigue was just due to dehydration, and he didn't like the idea of cooking our last meal.

Speaking of our last meal, it was pretty disgusting. Not that we could really afford to complain, but we used up the last of our, "I can easily believe it's not butter!", butter in the Lipton pasta mix. (Speaking of which, if you go on a backcountry trip, two Lipton pasta packets/day is not enough! Next time, we'll take four.) Anyway, it was disgusting, even by backcountry standards. I almost couldn't finish my bit of it.

Believe it or not, I managed to sleep a little that night. I had to get up every few hours to take a piss, but it didn't change the color of the snow, so I was happy. Mark still didn't sleep.

The next morning, Mark came up with his grand scheme to keep his feet warm. We ripped our tarp apart and made gaiters! It used up all the duct tape, and some p-cord as well, but they worked. Hiking is a lot more comfortable with dry feet.

Now, I'd always wondered how I'd manage my insulin if I didn't have any food to eat. Fortunately, we managed to arrange it so that we slowly ran out of food, so I had a reasonably good idea of how much to take. (Those of you who are wondering: 6 units of Humulin N in the morning, and 10 units at night. That's it!)

Mark set the pace that day. Because of his ultra-marathon running, he was pretty good at picking and keeping a pace. That left me to the endless and monotonous pain of hiking with two injured legs. Even 1000 mg of ibuprophen didn't completely eliminate the pain, but it certainly softened it a lot! Never go camping without ibuprophen, p-cord, and duct tape. Everything else is optional.

Mark tried telling stories to pass the time, but I had to tell him that I wasn't bothering to try to listen. It didn't stop him. It was clear that he no longer thought that I would die out here, though. Our last camp was only twelve miles from the ranger station, and, according to the GPS I'd brought, we were making almost 2 miles/hour. Not bad through snow this deep!

Well, here's a few photos from sometime during that day:

About four miles from the ranger station, we got one of our first lucky breaks. The ranger had driven his truck through the snow up to that point! He's got nice fat tires on his truck, too, so walking down the track wasn't so hard. Our speed poped up to 4 mph, and we decided to actually stop and eat most of the rest of our food. We had hours of daylight left, and only about an hour or so of hiking to go.

Hiking on the tire tracks was actually a lot more painful than hiking on nice, soft snow, but I didn't care. We were zipping along.