I fell asleep instantly last night, I jerk awake at 2:30AM and hear Wolf rummaging. Rummaging is my job. They’re already getting ready. “Wolf what time are we leaving I yell over?” 3:30 is the response. “Happy 2 weeks” I’ve officially been living in the woods for two weeks now.
Comfortable yet? Nah. Adapting to this new life? Absolutely.
Now, I’ll admit this one. For the first time in my life people were waiting for me. I took forever to get ready. I didn’t want to untuck. I put on again frozen wet socks into soaked boots. My feet look awful and I look forward to drying them out. Before I can do that though there’s like 40 more miles before I take a zero day.
Last things I do is break down my tent and stuff it in the stuff sack. From sleeping on the snow and melting it with my body heat the bottoms soaked. Now my hands are soaked also. I convince myself it’s ok I’m just going to get sweaty in a minute anyways. Next I wrap up my tyvek and then put on my micro spikes. Can’t go anywhere without them today. I start off cold in just my raincoat. Runners tip. My arm pit zippers let me dump heat out during the climbs and then zip them tight on the down hills to stay warm. I even ripped it this morning, 270$ raincoat ripped my finger right through it pulling it down. Sheesh
3:45AM we’re on the move, right from the start it’s looking like 14 miles of snow. Again I want it frozen but it’s not. It’s softened Italian ice in late June. So it’ll be 14 hours of postholing. Last night was actually a comfortable sleeping night. The temperature was not too cold and the wind was non existent. Perfect sleeping, but not ideal for the hard snow pack I desired.
As I started off up the trail, it’s exactly what you expect, up and down along tree lines through knee deep snow. I imagine what it’s like in April. But I chose a March date and there for in here killing it I tell my self.
About 3 miles in Wolf takes a step and the ground gives out underneath them and they slip into a small crevasse and twist hard tumbling down. I immediately run over and jumped down 4-5 feet to grab their arm. As Wolfs franticly try to reach up for anything I can’t reach them. I fling my trekking pole down with my left hand and pull as hard as I can to jerk them forward and grab Wolf’s hand with my right hand.
Shout out to black diamond equipment. I absolutely love my carbon trekking poles.
We’re not out of the woods yet, their heavy bag my heavy bag, slope, fighting gravity… It quickly turns to arm day, I pull as hard as possible and struggle. One more screaming pull and we both get stable footing. Ok, let’s get you out of this hole. Maybe 5 minutes later we both get up right, take a deep breath and say holy fuck. I was in the right place at the right time. We both sit down and assess any injuries and let’s take a minute to think the next section through.
After this incident it’s buddy system and keep moving, we still have a long day today to get to a camp on the other side of the mountain. If we don’t keep pace it’ll get dark before we get there. We want to hit mile 191 today and get below 7,700 feet. Back into pine forests with hopefully no snow.
Today’s also a day I didn’t really take many photos. I had no time, we walked from sunrise to almost sunset. I saved my battery knowing I’ll need it for the map to navigate. Some of the trails just gone, we have to work around things, climb over downed trees and basically figure it out as we go. FarOut app and my compass come in handy.
Even with that it’s still just so beautiful my heads always on a swivel. The last half mile to camp was downhill, to me it wasn’t risky downhill but downhill where your knees and feet are bearing all your weight.
I arrive at camp and start to stomp out a sleeping area. Seven walks in and says “how bad was today? That sucked!” All three of us agree on that. Although it was beautiful it was just physically hard, a great workout. My watch and ring said I burned 5930 calories.
I stomp down as much snow as I can but I still pitch my tent again on top of it. I climb into my tent to get warm and then begin dinner and melting snow to have some water.
I’m completely out of water and snows my only option. Melt first, filter after. My cook pot cooked rice, ramen, and pasta the last three days, now I have burnt rice flavored water. Gross I didn’t think that one through, it’s hard to drink.
As I lay in my tent I listen to the sounds outside. I hear chirps and some sound I don’t recognize. I think it’s a cougar making their yelp/chirp sounds. I’m too tired to care, tomorrow is another long day. I pull my quilt nice and tight after putting on my sleeping clothes (everything that’s not wet) and say goodnight to the other two. I think they thought it was kindve weird, but I also told them both I was proud of them.
We kicked ass today and covered some miserable terrain together. The last 50 miles were easy in comparison. As I take out my headphone to put in ear plugs for the night I hear Wolf talking on the phone. Shocked they have full cell service, I haven’t had a bar of service in two days.
Off to bed, looking to push on past the snow tomorrow. I heard a rumor that the snow ends after mile 195. That means only five more miles of post holing.
The Pacific Crest Trail 