Extra Board.  Or do they mean Extra Bored?

Ok, again, new to this tour thing.  I found out there is something on the tour schedule that is a cross between working and not working.  It is called Extra Board. A day off without being off.

So when assigned Extra Board, you basically uniform up, pre-check your bus, and are all set to hurry up and go nowhere at 8 am.  You are a fail-safe and a janitor at the same time.  If a driver overslept, didn’t read their assignment right, or just plain didn’t show up, you’ll be pulled to take their tour(s) last minute.  Maybe even do an HR new employee run.  Or take people to the grocery store.  Who knows.  If that doesn’t happen, the concierge will find some menial toilet cleaning tasks for you to do, and once you meet the minimum two hours, you can clock out and be done for the day.

I pulled Extra Board and given all of the scheduling mistakes I’ve seen, was prepared to drive something somewhere in the park today.  But it didn’t happen.  Now it’s 10 AM and I don’t have a backup plan.  Come on, Dave, you are better than that.

I run to the truck.  Boot up.  Gear up.  Fill the backpack.  I’m burning the last of the morning hours and the heat is coming up.  Where to go?  Rising Sun is only about eight miles away.  Let’s see how far I can get up Otokomi Peak in the long hours of summer when there is sun until 10 pm.

I recall the trail approach from last year.  I can keep going to Otokomi Lake for several miles and hit the gentler slopes to the summit, or take the off-trail climbing route directly off the first drainage and climb high really fast.  The Reynolds fire from several years back took out all the brush.  The beargrass bloom is looking amazing this year.

The choice was made for me when several people came running down the trail the opposite way.  They were apparently running from a grizzly bear that was following them.   Hmmmm.  Well, they had just come from a canyon, where the trail is narrow and the trail IS the best route thru that part of the forest.  So a bear on the trail actually makes sense.  But I was just at the crossroads for the direct off-trail climb to the peak, and up I went.

After 200 feet of gain, I look way down the trail and there she is.  Big old mama griz.  Lumbering down the trail.  I pull out my phone and shoot a two-minute video of the magnificent beast, head bobbing to and fro, shoulders rippling, walking down the trail like the apex predator she is.

Oh, yeah.  In my excitement when I went to zoom in turned off the video and captured nothing of this once-in-a-lifetime moment.  Fortunately for me, I have a mind like that camera in the Fred Flintstone cartoon.  The one where the bird flies out and chisels the scene in a stone tablet (clearly an early Polaroid pun). 

Nevertheless, those images are stamped into my mind forever.

With the adrenaline gone, I find myself on a very open, very hot, very miserable mountainside in a complete forest burn area with zero shade and zero urge to climb.  At the same time, I now have a grizzly bear, equally miserable and frustrated from the heat-seeking lower elevations, on the trail back to the car.  And I would be sneaking up on her.  Hmmmmm.

I couldn’t see where she had vanished on the trail, so I traversed the left for a better trail view in case she came back. Thus began a slow descent thru what I call the Pick-Up Sticks fallen logs in the long dead forest.   Very painful going.  Walking on logs and not touching the ground for almost an hour.  The Sun Road was right there.  A quick off-trail and I’m out.  But it is also the spot I would be in if I were a bear foraging on a hot day.

Once back on the trail, I had bear spray in hand and lots of ‘Hey Bear, are you there’ calls.  After a while, I passed a family of four heading the other way.  All is good.  Gave them some beta on the great bear encounter and beat my way back to the car.  After all, the day was still young, and I had laundry to do, and a couple of tour bits to work on, and this stupid blog wasn’t going to write itself.

Yes, this is going to be a different kind of summer and I knew that from the start.  I seem to spend a LOT of my free time in the common kitchen area.  That’s where all of the Jammer paperwork and the bus keys are stored.  And the wash bay is outside.  So I run across a lot of different people working a lot of different jobs.  After all, all roads lead to Rome.

Beargrass RV (my home away from home this summer) is starting to feel like that Island of Misfit Toy from that quirky stop-motion Xmas animation movie about the Santa Claus origin story (with the elf that wants to be a dentist). 

We seem to be picking up employees that work all over the East side because they have run out of housing for them at the specific location they work.  This means the employee shuttle on the East Side is getting a LOT more use than the one I ran on the West Side last summer. 

But I love human diversity.  Backstories.  People on personal missions, people who just ebb and flow with the tide of life, people letting the mountain winds waft them from adventure to adventure.  In my spare time, I hardly feel the urge to hike this summer. 

It feels almost sacrilegious to say that out loud let alone write down the actual words.  But the interpersonal experiences I’ve shared so early in the season are truly satisfying, if not wonderfully rewarding.  Last summer I fed the body.  This summer is about satiating the mind and soul.  And I could not ask for a better banquet table from which to feast.

That had almost a Hotel California kind of vibe to it. Just without the Satanic overtones. 🙂