Start: 383.1
Stop: 403.4
Today’s miles: 20.3
Total PCT miles: 591.2
Today wasn’t very exciting, especially after the day we had yesterday. I refused to get up before 7am-and even then I was on trail by 7:30, only a few minutes after the others. It had just started sprinkling as I was packing inside my tent, so I ended up with a wet tent to pack. Boo.
It was cold, windy, and raining. Thankfully the rain was light, so with my rain jacket on I felt warm enough when I was moving. The temperature was somewhere in the 50s all day, with mostly cloud cover until later in the afternoon. This didn’t stop the mosquitoes though, if I stopped for anything at all I was immediately swarmed.
I leapfrogged with Driver and his friend all morning and then caught up to Margot around lunchtime. We ate chips together, both not really wanting our other food-I have too many dinners so I could have cooked something but the bugs were too much. We ended up hiking close by each other the rest of the afternoon. There were no real views to see, either from the clouds or because of being in dense woods.
At one point she pointed out Mount Adams to me.. yesterday it seemed so far away, and today the base of it shocked me by how close and absolutely massive that mountain was! I had no idea we had gotten so close in just a day! Crazy! I wish the clouds would have cooperated so I could have gotten a better look, but no dice.
We made it to our designated campsite area by 4pm.. 20 miles done. There were tons of people camped here, but no Marquis. We sat and ate some skittles before deciding to walk the extra 0.3 of a mile to the next campsite, since it also has water. We weren’t sure if we’d stay there if he wasn’t there or keep pushing until we found him, since it was still pretty early.
Our sore feet were grateful that he was at the next site. Theres a bigger creek rushing by with brownish water, and then the back of the campsite has a crystal clear smaller stream feeding into it. It’s perfect! We all agreed to stay here and spent the next 4 hours setting up our tents, laughing, eating dinner and laughing some more. I have the most fun around these two.
Tomorrow we have another 20.3 miles to go to get to the road crossing into Trout Lake. The last shuttle leaves at 4:30pm, so hopefully tomorrow goes as smoothly as today did. It feels fast to be in town again already, but it’ll be another town with camping out back instead of a bed, so it doesn’t feel as exciting as it should. I mean, hot shower, clean clothes and apparently an awesome taco truck *is* super exciting.. but a real bed sounds pretty nice, too.
Knowing I have to get up early is making my eyelids droop already. Time to get some shut eye. Sweet dreams, y’all.