PCT day 80 – Fire!
We got up at 5:30am. There is an 'excessive heat' warning in place for today and tomorrow so we wanted to get an early start. Cool Breeze and I spend a lot of time talking about food on the trail and I have tried to explain what a Yorkshire Pudding is several times. After telling the stories Mumma Cool Breeze surprised me this morning and made me Yorkshire puddings!!
We had them with salmon and some with jam...which was slightly unconventional...but, they tasted really good and it was so so nice of her! I hope Al liked them because they are going to be on the menu for a while!!
They drove us back to where they had picked us up and we said goodbye, for real this time!!
We hiked 5 miles and had a rest, ate our packed out Yorkshire puddings and bacon! We only hiked another mile and we both stopped in our tracks at the same time and smelt fire. We went to inspect a fire pit just off the trail and it was smouldering. Someone hadn't put out their fire properly. The ground was red hot. Too hot to touch. The roots underground were burning.
Cool Breeze dug around with his trowel. We had 2 litres of water between us – not enough to put the fire out. I saw there may be a creek half a mile away so took some bottles and went to check it out. It was dry. By the time I had come back Cool Breeze had managed to flag down the only vehicle coming up the dead end road – a U.S. Forest service department fire truck! What are the chances?! She had shovels and all the necessary equipment for fighting fires!
She went off to look for me down the road but I had gone bushwhacking through the forest in search of water and somehow popped out back at the place we saw the fire. They had got it all under control and moved the rocks and exposed the hot earth to the air. The forest service lady was a vey loud crazy Canadian! She gave us a bottle of water each to drink and thanked us for, well, basically saving California from burning down. I asked her what we should have done had she not turned up and we were doing the right thing – it just might have taken us a lot longer with our little poop trowels!
We carried on up the trail - a little off schedule after our hour and a half of firefighting! The terrain was fairly easy. Little ups and lots of down. And the weather was weird - it wasn't really that hot! We were expecting to be sweating uncontrollably, but it was cloudy and we were going under trees. Pretty sure Mother Nature was thanking us for saving the planet earlier today.
Our aim was to get to the middle fork of the Feather river so we could go for a swim and cool off. But when we got there it wasn't actually that hot! And the river that we were told was really warm was kinda cold. But we went in and cooled off and it was actually quite pleasant – cooling on my 10 thousand bites – until we saw a water snake!
We had intended to do a few more miles as we only made 15 miles today, but we decided to stay here instead, there was a nice camp area and there was a bit of a climb out of the valley. A few other people had the same idea and we were camped with 9 other people whom we had never met before.
I've really enjoyed being on the trail today. I guess the rest did me good. I hope Growler celebrated Canada day in a suitable style!