Miles today: 14.1
Trail miles sum: 1909.3
Trail location: 2591.6
Elevation: 4848
Spinning on the turntable:
Today I was hiking back to Noelle and it was going to be a short hiking day so I took a few extra minutes this morning to cook my oatmeal.
I’m completely sick of cold soaked oats, and the few extra minutes of preparation time is woth the warm meal. If the weather were warming I’d stick with cold soaked, but the cooler weather is leaving me wanting warm food.
I started the morning with soaking socks. I carry two pairs of socks with me for hiking and one pair for sleeping. Both sets of hiking socks are soaked. It’s certainly a wake up call to put on cold, wet socks. Usually there’s some kind of sunshine during the day to dry out “stuff” but yesterday there wasn’t.
I was crazy happy to find a pit toilet near the camping area this morning. Somehow, everything is just a little bit better when there’s somewhere to sit to poop. I am grateful.
I continued the climb uphill early this morning. It wasn’t too bad. I’m spending a lot of time just looking down at the trail when it rains. When it’s not raining I enjoy looking around. It’s so disapointing that the weather is so cruddy. This is supposed to be spectacular section, but it’s just dreary. I havent found any other hikers that are enjoying it very much.
Today I spoke with another hiker about the search helicopter that I discussed on Day 158. Unfortunately the news wasn’t good.
The search and rescue found the missing hiker but unfortunately they had fallen off a cliff and died.
I had a choice of trying to walk across this incomplete log bridge or navigate from rock to rock in the water. Since the bridge wasn’t complete I opted to bypass the bridge and take a chance on the water.
I later hit another bridge like this but it was about ten feet above the water. I stuck my arms out, worked on my balance, and tip toed across the bridge with success.
I ran across this crazy looking mushroom this afternoon. I nudged it gently with my toe and it seems mushroom’ish. I’m not sure if it’s actually a mushroom.
I hiked to the trailhead mid-afternoon and met up with Noelle. We’ve been apart for about a week. It was a long week. Tomorrow I’ll go back on the trail and finish up up Washington.
Imagine how many others would love to do just a portion of what you are doing.
Would you rather be sitting at your previous work?
Are the trials and tribulations of the trail more than your ultimate enjoyment?
Are the trial and tribulations of the trail part of what constitutes your ultimate enjoyment?
The trials and tribulations of the trail will constitute a big part of the ultimate enjoyment. We can’t experience the lotus without the mud! The challange of the blog is to be honest about what we experience and to try to document it. Some days the hike just sucks. Some days it’s amazing. We try to capture both. The weather of Washington the past few weeks has been less than ideal. There’s a great deal of wisdom in section hiking to be able to cherry pick the best sections at the best time of the year. As I write this today snow is falling ( and sticking ) on the trail near the northern terminus. I suspect that most (All?) of the thru-hikers are still there only with the desire to finish the trail, not there because it’s super fun in the moment.
The picture at the top of this entry is particularly beautiful
Thanks! Even with the heavy cloud cover the views can be spectacular.