After a restful night at the Castle Crags SP, we walked back to the market/gas station to wait for Midnight Chocolate's parents to pick Xena up. While we were there we ran into some familiar faces! We hung out with Stilts, Muppet, Baxter and Wildcat who we last saw 800 miles ago. Samba and Tallywa showed up as well.
After Xena left, we hung around a little longer as it is hard to leave the comfort of friends and a convenience store within a 50 step walk. However, we knew it would be best mentally to hit the trail again even though the heat of the day was upon us. That afternoon we hiked 12 miles and got our big climb out of the way which took us around, up and eventually behind the Castle Crags.
The next morning Midnight Chocolate discovered she had a good bout of poison oak. Turns out she is highly allergic to it. It looked pretty nasty, so I included a pic of it below. :) As for the hiking, we were above treeline for most of the day and it was beautiful. We hiked along the crest and over numerous saddles looking down upon many lakes. We ran into a nice day hiker on a break. She asked us if we were hiking the whole trail. After we said yes she said, "I brought you a piece of fruit, but you will have to share," and pulled out a white peach. It was delicious. We sat on the trail eating it while talking to her about our hike. Later we had a siesta at an ice cold spring that was coming out right under the trail! Here we met Forest who was hiking southbound as he is flip-flopping the PCT to hopefully connect all the miles together to complete his hike this fall. It was fun talking to him about who he had seen in front of us in the previous days, yet a little bit of a bummer to hear how far away some of our friends were from us.
Our third day out we did our first 30 mile day! It was a flatter stretch of trail so we figured it would be a good time to try it. It wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. Many of the water sources showing on our map were actually dry and one stream that did have water flowing smelled horrible as we came upon it. When we got to it, there was a hand-written note from a fellow hiker not to get water here (see pic below). Nice to know the hikers ahead are looking out for us!
Thankfully the next day was not as hot as we had cloud cover. It was nice to not feel restricted to hiking in the morning and evening avoiding the heat of the day. We hiked 25 miles and got to camp at 6pm which is unusually early for PCT standards.
These longer days helped set us up for a short hike today to get us to Etna Summit. When we got to the road, Emporer had been waiting there for 40 minutes without a single car coming by. Sure enough, we were there about 2 minutes when a pick-up truck came by and took all three of us straight to Motel Etna!
Ahhh, I do love town days! Even though we are only here for the night, it still feels like a rest day. We were majorly in need of laundry as it had been 11 days since the last wash. After showers and laundry, the next logical thing to do was to hit the Etna Brewery! Now it is well past hiker midnight (9pm) and I am ready for a good night sleep in a bed. Tomorrow we hit the trail and work our way towards Seiad Valley and soon after will enter Oregon!
Trail stats after 98 days and 1606 miles:
# snakes: 23
# bears: 1
# pushups: 710
# nights indoor: 14
# showers: 20
# loads laundry: 15
# days of rain: 3
Pics from top to bottom:
- Castle Crags in back
- 7 days of food for us
- Hiking above treeline
- Midnight Chocolate's poison oak
- Dead cow water sign
- Hitching into Etna
- Cool rocks in the Russian Wilderness
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