Direction: Southbound

Trail location: 1284.9

Cumulative miles hiked: 2024

Miles hiked today: 7.97

Elevation: 4912’

High/low temp/humidity : 85/59/25

Spinning on the turntable: Bruce Springsteen: Letter to you

Our friends Mark/Claire drove down to Old Station from Lynnwood Washington this week. We met up with them last night and tremendously enjoyed their company.

We met them on our very first day on the PCT.

I like the symmetry of starting this leg of the hike with them too. While we got busy trekking this morning, they drove our camper truck about 600 miles down the road for us to collect after we finish our hike.

We chatted with some thru hikers last night. Such a smelly bunch! 24 hours later and I’m now part of the smelly bunch! We picked their brains about the Sierra section of the trail. One of them suggested night hiking to avoid the heat near Beldon. Shut the front door! I thought we were done with that business after the LA aqueduct. We’ll see.

I was highly amused to see one of the hikers working her way through a half gallon of ice cream! I look like I’ve swallowed far too much ice cream lately, so I’ll hold off on my half gallon for a few days.

We began this leg of our PCT trekking quest with hugs from Mark and Claire and then started walking. Last time there was a lot of hikers starting at the same time. Today it was just Noelle and I. It was less exciting, but less stressful. It really is easy, ya know. You just start walking.

We passed approximately 20 northbound thru-hikers today. It was interesting to me. They seemed uniformly focused on hiking and were moving along at a good clip. At first I was thinking that they needed to relax a bit, but after I did a bit of mental math, I decided I should flog them to move faster. Canada is calling you!

We’re repeating about 40 miles of the trail that I’ve already hiked to give us a bit of time to acclimate before we have a 4000’ hill to climb out of Chester.

We ended our day next to a stream. I couldn’t help myself, I had to stick my feet in the water.

I stopped earlier today and taped up three hotspots on my right foot. It surprised me to have potential blisters so quickly.

Tomorrow morning we’ll start the day with a hill climb and shoot for a camping/water spot about 12 miles down the trail.

Our Guthook gps phone app updates the trail sites (water/tent/etc) with user comments. Our target for tomorrow nights camping spot has this little recent ditty: