PCT day 96 – 1500 miles
Of all the stupid decisions we have made, camping 50 yards from the Interstate was one of the stupidest. The cars don't stop all night. The road is full of people going places in a hurry. It was loud and it was bright.
We were up at 5am. I was on the trail at 5:36! Cool Breeze left shortly after. I was about a mile / 30 minutes into the day I heard snapping of branches. I stopped and listened and looked around. Then behind me a bear came crashing through the woods. I'm 95% sure it was a bear. I just saw its behind! Then I kept seeing bear poo all along the trail.
I've made 1500 miles!
After 5 miles I stopped and waited for Cool Breeze. We were near the start of the big climb. The trees were running out and it was getting hotter. We started climbing. A 2500ft climb in 95 degrees wasn't something I was looking forward to. But we were walking through Castle Craggs national park so we had great views all day.
We stopped for a lunch break at 12 to wait out the heat of the day in the shade. It was just too hot. We tried to nap and catch up on our lack of sleep from last night. We were passed by Jonny Walker, Pony, Pasta and someone else and Steady. We managed to lure Steady in - who we hadn't seen since Belden - and we had a chat with her.
At 2 we carried on hiking. The heat was making me feel sick. I was dehydrated. I added a new flavour water enhancer to my water, berry pomegranate, which I thought sounded nice. Nope, it tasted like artificial grape, so that was making me feel sick too. I was going slow and I tried to make Cool Breeze go ahead of me but he wanted to make sure I didn't faint. He gave me his water to drink while he drunk my gross stuff. That perked me up a bit and we got to the water source where we found all the others gathered in the shade. The water was just about flowing and someone had stuck a leaf in the stream to create a funnel for filling bottles. Very handy. We had some more food and moved on.
We finally got a good view of Mt Shasta! The afternoons walking was quite pleasant. The sun had gone behind the clouds and we were in more trees.
24.5 miles got us to a camp area where Pony and Pasta also stayed. Pasta built a camp fire which we all ate our dinners around. Really nice to have a fire after so long, and it kept the bugs away.
I had a good food day today. Morning snack of tortilla with cream cheese, courtesy of the Best Western, and salami (some posh stuff, not the cheap shit). Lunch of tuna and crackers. Snacks - twix, gushers, Cheetos. Dinner - noodles and Oreos.