PCT Day 17 Recap
After a beautiful clear night under the stars the sun woke us up and slowly heated the morning air. Warm enough that I even opted to wear a pair of shorts instead of hiking pants. A dehydrated scrambled eggs with sausage and potatoes was how the morning began. We picked up camp, filtered some more water from the stream right next to our campsite.
A few early morning northbound hikers were already on their way past our campsite. Historically from our first 16 days on the PCT we haven't encountered many hikers but that was about to change as we realized that all the thru hikers started in early March were now on the same part of the trail all heading northbound so we would get to see each and everyone of them. They were a little surprised to see our group of heading southbound as everyone else was going in their same direction.
One thing that never disappoints on the PCT is the change of scenery. Yesterday's high elevation, snow, grand views of other snow covered peaks were quickly changed as we continued to lower elevations. We would spend most of the day following the river all the way until we reached our 2nd night's camp site.
This early in the year there has been no trail maintenance so we probably navigated over or around 25 downed trees that were on the trail. As we passed northbound hikers we usually asked where they were from as well as they often volunteered what we were to run into below as we shared about the snow hazards they may face above in their direction. We learned that there were many stream crossings and to look for cairns (piles of rocks) to indicate the proper way thru the rock beds. We also heard from multiple groups that they had run into swarms of bees which stung them. Yikes.
It was bright and sunny all day and the lower we traveled into the canyon the hotter it got. We mostly were able to stay on the trail or if we lost the trail one of us quickly figured out how to find our way back. We eventually drank all the water we had filtered. Each of us had about 3 liters and had to take a break and fill up a liter each so we could make it to our next camp. Again our progress was slower than expected for a downhill section and it was more than a mile longer than Friday's hike. Also Mai was plagued by several blisters that we had to stop and remedy. The riverbed crossings were slow and once again we would not make it to our camp location until nearly sunset. What we found is carrying a full backpack our rests were more often and much longer than our typical day hikes.
We come to rely on the FarOut app and it seems to give us exact distances to our destination so even if our Garmin's are a little off we have a really good idea how far we have left to our next destination. Friday night we had dinner together with Oobrianoo, but Saturday night we set up our tent, filtered water, bathed in the stream and just passed out in the tent until we finally had enough energy to fire up our jetboil and make some dinner. Saturday's choice was ReFuel's Chicken Teriyaki Rice which is now our favorite trail dinner.
Saturday night was much warmer and we didn't freeze like the first night. Clouds rolled in and the sky was less clear so a the star gazing was not as good as the first night. We were more tired and going to bed by 10 and sleeping till almost 8 we got a really good nights rest.
I went to sleep fast, but woke up every hour or two to roll or reposition, I think next time I'll bring 2 ground mats, the inflatable and the egg crate style.
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