We did it again!
It seems Jordy and I have decided that August is a good month to load many pounds of sleeping gear and food onto our backs and hike out into Desolation Wilderness. This year we took the Bayview Trailhead off Highway 89, which meant we could see Lake Tahoe growing smaller and smaller as we trudged 1,700 feet up for five miles. At one point, I turned, plopping my hands on Jordy’s shoulders, panting, nearly whining, and huffed, “Human bodies are not meant to do this!” It was hard.
Our way of backpacking these days is to hike in, set up a stellar base camp, and day hike for the rest of the trip until it’s time to don the packs–lighter now since we’ve eaten most of the food—for the trip back out. It is such a treat on those light days to pack water, a layer, and lunch, and walk for hours, stopping whenever anything catches our eye, studying flowers and rocks with the loupe I was gifted from herb school, and jumping into all the bodies of water we see. This year we even had a chance to play in the snow above Fontanillis Lake. Top this all off by watching the moon grow, studying the stars, and waking before dawn to see Venus and Jupiter dancing together, and I’d have to say, despite a rocky and steep start, we had a fantastic week.
Looking at the world through a loupe is fascinating.
I learned from last year’s lack of an herbal first aid kit and packed damiana tincture to help digest all that dehydrated backpacking food. Damiana is well-known as an aphrodisiac. She also helps with mood-boosting and stress-relief, both great in the arenas of digestion and libido, so it seems like damiana had us covered as far as an herbal remedy. We also brought:
a collection of band-aids and needed them thankfully only to protect blisters that formed
lots of sunscreen, which my neck would have appreciated…ouch!
aspirin (never needed)
arnica (took the pills each night to help recover from the hiking)
Other than that, our First Aid was a fizzy electrolyte drink each morning and plenty of water throughout the day. We LOVE our new water filter!!! It felt like an absolute delight to collect and filter water this way compared to our previous UV pen, which always felt like waving a magic wand into the Nalgene and hoping for the best. Last year the pen stopped working fairly quickly into the trip, so we ended up boiling the water or collecting it from a rushing stream, hoping the rock filtration was doing something good. We were fine, but it’s not comforting to use up propane to boil water or simply get it from a stream and hope for the best. A+ to the team who created this squeezebag filtration system!
Jumping into mountain lakes is really the reason to hike into the backcountry. The refreshing chill of cold water on the skin is better than the morning’s beloved coffee. But my skin suffered. With each dip, my skin dried out more and more. It got to the point where I would stop and consider if I really had it in me to jump into that lake because it meant I’d have to pull out the moisturizer and SPF, reapply a coat, and hope my skin would soak it in and stop itching from extreme dryness. By day two, I was contemplating whether or not the pH balance of lake water was damaging, or at least challenging, to skin. The exact pH of the lakes in Desolation Wilderness is a bit inconclusive, but from what I read, it seems it must be at a higher pH than our skin, making it more alkaline.
This is what he’s seeing. We think it’s epidote.
Happily filtering water….
It doesn’t get prettier than this.
Skin has what’s called an acid mantle. An acid mantle is a thin, protective coating—the outermost layer of the skin. It’s made of sebum, sweat, and dead skin cells. Sounds great, eh? It is! It has a slightly acidic pH, typically between 4.5-6.5, creating a protective barrier against external stressors such as bacteria and fungi, and helps to neutralize alkaline substances, such as, perhaps Sierra Nevada lake water! I believe I stripped my acid mantle right off.
I was helpless to do anything other than slather on my Lavender Geranium Facial Oil and cover that with sunscreen each time I jumped in. In one week I went through the amount of oil I usually go through in an entire month! And I still dried out like a peach pit. Parched. Rough. Itchy. Depleted of any moisture. It was not good. I chafed at my hips and shoulders from the backpack rubbing on that monstrous hike up, while the rest of my body dehydrated like an apple left out in the sun. Wrinkled, browned. All in all: not good.
So what did I learn?
Instead of hiking up two decks of cards in case we both wanted to play Solitaire (not a single game was played), next time, I’ll leave those behind and carry up that bottle of hydrosol we left in the van. Hydrosols not only feel hydrating for the skin, they act as toners and can help restore the pH that gets altered by environmental stressors like alkaline water. The first thing we did when we reached the van is spritz ourselves with the Orange Blossom Hydrosol. What a treat. And then we got creamsicles. Can’t wait until next year.
The waxing moon.
