I don’t think I’ve posted my Gold Mint Trail scare story up here before. Here it is:

While hiking Gold Mint Trail in Hatcher’s Pass Alaska (someday I’m going to have time to get to the Bomber out on the glacier there) a couple of years ago I had a scare.

It was the first hike I had been on after recovering from a protracted illness and discovery that I could no longer eat wheat, among too many other things to list. My meals were mostly potatoes and peas and tuna or chicken, but I had this great recipe for pancakes made with teff flour.

Things had gone quite well on the hike in, Gold Mint trail is pretty easy for the first seven miles, just a long low upslope and only one sometimes (depends on the snowfall the previous year) treacherous river crossing. The beavers had taken over some parts of the trail, so there was interesting brushwalking in swamp and alders that year, but it was still pretty easy.

The tail end of the trail has a hilariously fun marmot-infested boulder field that still has old gold mining equipment rusting away and a goat track (literally) up a cliff face, and these put you out into a hanging valley. Beautiful views from here. We camped in the valley and the next morning I realized that I really couldn’t stomach the pancakes. Trying to force myself to eat them resulted in heaving. The dog loved them. I didn’t have enough backup food to make more breakfast, HWSNBN’s breakfast was NOT something I could eat and we really needed to pack up and go to get back to the car on time so I just ate my last rice breakfast bars and pushed on.

Going down I did pretty well until I got lightheaded on the goat track. I had some candy and did okay for a little bit, then my vision went fuzzy and I stumbled sideways.

Into thin air.

HWSNBN was above and right to me and somehow managed to grab my pack strap. Kept me from falling 20-30 feet down to the next ledge, assuming I would have stayed there. It was a narrow ledge.

I ended up crawling down the goat track. I kept on seeing double and fuzzing out.

And now I always make doubly sure to pack a lot of extra food I like just in case. Usually I do anyway, but we had packed up kind of quickly that time and we both forgot to pack an extra day’s meal that we both could eat. And I was still having trouble finding things I COULD eat. I had liked the teff pancakes at home, just not on the trail. That had never happened to me before.

I doubt 20-30 feet would have killed me but it was pretty freaky.