Pacific Crest Trail: Northern California Part 2

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11th to 18th July: Day 82 to 89 – Mile 1,511

Day 82 – mile 1,342 
Day 83 – mile 1,367
Day 84 – mile 1,386
Day 85 – mile 1,409
Day 86 – mile 1,437
Day 87 – mile 1,467
Day 88 – mile 1,489
Day 89 – mile 1,511
 
There’s no pleasing some people. Out of the snow, my leg is better but I use the time free of physical pain to wallow in my own self-pitying thoughts.
 
I don’t take many photos or write much in my notes.
 
I walk through Lassen national park and don’t bother taking the side trails to see the geysers and boiling lake.
I walk past Burney falls and don’t take a photo.
 
I say goodbye to Weatherman, he’s hurt his foot and is hitching ahead to get it checked. I think I’ll catch up with him at some point but never manage it. The last I see of him is drinking a milkshake at a highway cafe (the finer points of veganism are not mentioned).
 
I reach a low at the highway at mile 1,502. I sit in the car park of a gas station eating hugely suspicious burritos and write a self-pitying email to Steve (the birdwatcher from scene 24, who drove me to Ridgecrest).
 
But I start feeling better straight after that (apart from salt poisoning from the burrito, which requires me to lie down next to a stream for two hours) and there are some fun people in the next section who will have cheered me up by Etna (mile 1,600).
 
I mean, there’s a guy coming up who is documenting the number of farts he does on trail, drinks only what is objectively the world’s most ridiculous whisky, and has weaponised the singing of ABBA.

Stock footage of Burney falls, which I walked straight past to buy a coke from the gift shop.

19th July: Day 90 – Mile 1,537

I camp by a lake with Tea Time (French/Swiss, carries loose leaf tea) and Danger Poles (Canadian, named for habit of swinging trekking poles around wildly as he walks – known to everyone behind him on the trail because he left detailed notes in the PCT forum for upcoming water sources). Fun guys – we’ll finish with Tea Time in a thousand miles.
 
My implicit deal with US big pharma has come back to bite me today – I have not avoided direct sunlight as required by my probably unnecessary doxycycline and now the skin under my finger nails is on fire, and (sorry) the nails are starting to come away from the skin.
 
I write in my notes “this feels like being tortured for secret codes that I definitely do not have”.

Castle Crags

Perpetual Mount Shasta – appearing on the horzion once again to call out for Dinsdale.

20th to 23rd July: Day 91 to 94 – Mile 1,600

Day 91 – mile 1,561 
Day 92 – mile 1,586
Day 93/94 – mile 1,600
 
Road to Etna. It’s a tricky 10 mile hitch down from the mountains – very little traffic going past.
 
Luckily loveable Canadian ‘Maple’ (drunk a bottle of maple syrup in Idyllwild, I think is the story) has got a family with a pickup truck to wait for me to take us down.
 
The back of the truck is full of picnic goods and gravestones. Mostly gravestones.
 
The gravestones mean that there isn’t room to wedge yourself in in the normal way, so we sit on coolers with nothing much to hold on to.
 
We twist around at high speed down the mountain road. Any sudden braking would mean sailing off the truck, over the gravestones, to certain death down the side of the mountain. I like to think they would leave a gravestone behind for me in that scenario.
 
We eat dinner in Etna, and talk about the Sierra: I mention going through with 13, and four out of the six people there remember being passed by him at some point on the trail (memorable from his speed and lack of phone/technology).
 
The town park allows camping for thru-hikers. The line between thru-hiker and hobo is often narrow. Someone, who shall remain nameless, tells about how the night before he got so drunk in a pub that he got up on stage and tried to sing with the band. The charitable description of the next bit is that he couldn’t be bothered to put his tent up so cowboy camped. But in reality that means he got drunk, went to a park, and passed out on the grass. And then was woken up the next day by the sprinklers coming on.

Sleeping bear.

Shasta!

24th to 26th July: Day 95 to 97 – Mile 1,679

Day 95 – mile 1,625 
Day 96 – mile 1,656
Day 97 – mile 1,679
 
I have this terrible stomach ache. I assume it has something to do with the pizza I ate that was mostly trans fats, the bag of gummy worms I ate that were mostly sorbitol, and the family pack of ice creams I ate for breakfast (er, because otherwise they’d have been thrown away?)
 
We’ve known for a few days that getting out of Seiad valley is going to be hard – a 5000ft climb with the temperature up to 35 degrees.
 
To get in the best place for this, I need to walk 31 miles in a day. This is not fun with this stomach ache. Annoyingly, it will stay with me day and night until I stop taking the doxycycline in about a week.
 
I learn a good trick on the climb out of the valley – how to track Ent’s footprints. This method has a much greater range than just listening out for ABBA, though in a few hundred miles it will steer me wrong when I accidentally track the footprints to a daft racist who happens to be wearing the same shoes as Ent.

Goodbye Shasta! You’ve been watching over us, slightly creepily, for 14 days, but today is the last – tomorrow we will be in Oregon after 3 months walking across California.

Everything is on fire a bit

This is smoke from the milepost 97 fire.

In 2017 a lot of different bits of the trail got closed for forest fires.

Luckily this fire will not stop us getting to Ashland, Oregon to eat all the Cheetos and some of the beer.

We briefly pass through the 51st state – the state of Jefferson! What it lacks in legal status it makes up for in merchandise.

(This isn’t my photo.  Maybe it’s one Weatherman sent me?)

27th to 29th July: Day 98 to 100 – Mile 1,717

Day 98 – mile 1,710
Day 99/100 – mile 1,717
 
Another 31 mile day, and across the border into Oregon – California is done!!
 
Someone has left a cooler of sodas on the trail for thru-hikers.
 
I get to a place to camp but there is a family from Ashland having a picnic and no thru-hikers so decide to carry on. A lady there asks if I know Orca and Fasttimes who she happened to meet when she was in Southern California in April. This seems like a long shot and I haven’t. Later on, someone else will ask me this as well – I think because Fasttimes has the same accent as me (though is actually welsh) so people like to think we know each other. In 600 miles or so I will, as it happens, catch up with them and by that time I’ll know so much about them it’s almost like meeting old friends – and they’re pleased to hear, via me, from their actual old friends. In turn, they have a story about 13 – but anyway this is way ahead.
 
Next day it’s into Ashland for a zero (ie a day off – zero trail miles). We meet up with Conundrum again (Belgian, lives in Uk, I actually met him on Day 1, but didn’t seem him again until Day 93) and we entertain ourselves with putting together food packages to post strategically along the trail to get to Washington, as the opportunity to buy stuff on trail through Oregon is limited.

Unlike the half way point, this does feel like an important milestone. Though it seems odd to say it with a 1000 miles still to go: we’re on the home straight now. An easy 500 miles through Oregon and a medium 500 miles through Washington and it’s done.

That’s only as much as a traverse of the Pyrenees and back. Hmm.

Resupplying in Ashland. Not sure the point of this photo – I don’t want any of these things.  It really emphasises that s’mores must be better than the sum of their parts, because their parts are terrible.