Start: 357.6
Stop: 367.8
Today’s miles: 10.2
Total PCT miles: 555.6
I slept horribly. It’s possible that it was because I was in a tent city and I happened to drink all the caffeine in the world during the afternoon yesterday. I tossed and turned and rolled and flopped and all around didn’t sleep much at all. There was also lights on and trucks flying by.. sometime around 1am I decided to put my headband over my eyes like an eye mask. It helped so much!
When I woke up, it was because I felt like I was baking. When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see, I forgot I had the headband on! I ripped it off and was shocked to find that I was in direct sunlight, roasting, and it was almost 7:30am. Welp. Guess it’s time to get up!
I was about to start packing but decided to go pee first, since I needed to walk all the way to the front of the store to do so. I put my phone on a charger, said hi to Marquis and Margot who were both already up and at the picnic tables, handled my business, then went back to pack.
I got everything but my food packed and then took my food stuff to the picnic tables and started figuring out my life. I had way too many dinners! But they’re all my favorites so I didn’t want to give anything away. Mom also sent me some yummy coffee as a surprise! I’m pretty happy about that!
I went inside the store and bought myself breakfast and then some snacks for the trail. More and more people started to wake and hang out at the picnic tables. We somehow didn’t leave to walk to trail until 11am. Haha. It was good though, it gave me a chance to update the blog, almost completely, and post some pictures. All in all I was really enjoying sitting around listening and chiming in on the hiker chatter.
We started climbing immediately once we hit the trail. It was hot. It was buggy. Two miles later the three of us were in our underwear swimming in some tiny lake we passed. The hard part was leaving town, any mileage we made today was just easing up the next three days, so it really didn’t matter much. When we were drying out and eating lunch (left over pizza, yum) 3 more hikers showed up-Crash, RaveDaddy, and I forgot the guy’s name (sorry guy).. the first two immediately got in the water, too. Never pass up a chance to swim!
We continued climbing after the lake, close to the top of the ascent we had perfect views of Mount Rainier without a single cloud covering its summit. It was gorgeous! And then the trail followed a ridge for a bit, crossed over a pass, and then gave even more epic views of Rainier before going back down into the woods. We stopped for water a few times, including a side hike at 5:30 that we were considering camping at.. but then decided to push instead 2 more miles to the next site.
Now that we’re here, I’m glad we pushed. This site is bigger, slightly less buggy, and out in the open. Even still, we had to set up camp fast and climb inside our tents thanks to the bloodsuckers. We set up in a circle though, so we all talked and laughed while waiting on the sun to set. Another hiker, a NOBO named Scraps, showed up and gave us the details of what’s ahead and we did the same for him.
Tomorrow we’ll have a 7 mile climb to the top of the Goat Rocks, which we can then summit Old Snowy Mountain and then we go over the Knife’s Edge. He said there were a couple sketchy rock scramble parts but that the views were epic. We’re all pretty excited about that! I’m not excited about climbing for 7 miles, but knowing the views will be stunning makes it worth it. Until then, goodnight y’all!