Shredded Bottles and Swamp Monsters

Right before the sun came up during Hardrock a few weeks ago, I crawled over the top of Grant-Swamp pass and lay down for a solid five minutes. When I got up I followed Troy down the hideously steep and loose southern slope of the pass, and in an ill-fated step attempt across a wet rock band, I slipped and wrecked about ten feet down the hill. When I came to a stop one of my bottles had cascaded down the hill out of sight and we decided, more or less, "f#$* it."

Well today I went back up there to find the bottle, and after several moments of paralyzing post traumatic stress disorder brought on by revisiting the site of such suffering, managed to locate the bottle. This is what it looked like:

Now I would love to blame this on Julien Chorier somehow, but I can't seem to find a way to twist the story that way. So instead of that (and instead of accepting that marmots probably did that), I'm going to go ahead and blame this abomination on the beast that was Kyle Skaggs but which now lives in the depths of Island Lake and ventures out once each year to feed on the broken souls of Hardrockers. Because that's definitely what happened to him.

Nice forefoot strike, kyle

On another note, running down the trail reminded me of Julien Chorier's incredible ability during Hardrock to find the course no matter how poor the course marking was. By the time we were descending towards the KT aid station Troy and I had come to the conclusion that if we ever lost the trail in snow, following Julien's footsteps would lead us exactly to the right spot. And they always did. It was almost eerie how exact his sense of direction was. So once again, instead of attributing such professional route-finding skill to something reasonable, I'm going to go ahead and say that Julien cheated by using Rickey Gates' evil black magic to lead them from course marker to course marker. Rickey, of course, was pacing Julien, and we all know that Rickey is a level-four evil wizard.

Pictured: Rickey Gates at Chapman Aid Station

Also, Nick Clark probably has a twin. Just saying.