Day 128: The overhead went an odd colour overnight, so I decided I needed to get closer to it to see if I could figure out what had happened. Since I can't get into the Park (the road won't be fixed until at least mid-March), the next best option was the summit of Hugo Peak. Never mind that the frost hadn't disappeared (and wouldn't do so all day). A hike was definitely in order. My first surprise came roughly three-quarters of a mile up from parking. The trail had been rerouted to make a longer, lazier ascent through what had previously been a rather unpleasant section. A little further on, I noticed more evidence that Pack Forest's trail crew had been at work. The old fence-wire clad footlogs had been removed from a particularly wet portion of the trail, gravel had been put down and a new puncheon bridge allowed passage over rechannelled runoff. By the time I got to the top of Hugo, I'd counted at least six places where the trail had been refurbished or rerouted. All the nastiest sections were gone! But an even more substantial surprise came when I turned away from the overgrown, brushy view of Eatonville a thousand feet below. A small yellow diamond bore the magic-marker legend, "Viewpoint 0.15 mi." and indicated an entirely new trail which sloped away to the east. At its end, I found this view, still somewhat obscured but a vast improvement on that offered on top of Hugo. There was one more surprise awaiting me, and it was the best of all. En route to a corner where I hoped to find Snow Queens in bloom, I ran into an old friend, my former supervisor from my Carbon River days. Our paths have crossed a few times over the years, but oddly, never on the trail. We chatted until we both started shivering in the rapidly cooling afternoon, and then went our separate ways, John and his dogs to his home, me to find the Snow Queens. I did, although the highlight of discovering them was overshadowed by the other events of the day.
