I wake up at 5:30 and pack up, I head off and up the first hill, today’s another short day. Another 16 miles and I’ll be setting up early. The trail is two climbs and then 8 miles of downhill into camp.
It starts off in a beautiful forest with cliffs of granite around us. I stop for my first break and Seal walks up behind me. He says “hey how’s it going” and we start hiking together, his plans the same as mine today. We go 3 miles and sit for a bit, the altitude has us both breathing heavy.
The views start the change and snow starts to appear. As soon as we hit 10,000’ elevation its patches of snow. Luckily is firm and we can just walk right over it, we go another three miles and stop for lunch. We’re going to yard sale our gear and dry it out from the night prior.
As we’re chilling two German women walk by and we chat with them for a bit. One of them is fighting a shin splint, yikes I know that feeling back in Wrightwood. Luckily I got over it but I had to power through for probably 200 miles of hard stretching, ice and changing the way I walked.
They say goodbye and walk on and we keep hanging out. Seals a 27 year old engineer from Ohio who quit to do the trail. We hang for another half hour and Wolf walks into our hang out. Wolf sits down and starts to eat lunch too.
Ten minutes later Seven and Dallas walk in and we all hang for a few more minutes. After that we walked the remaining miles into camp and leap frogged each other till we got to Death Creek.
Overall the creek was stunning, we didn’t see any death, and it had ice cold water that tasted delicious. I pitched my tent in a flat spot and tucked in for the night, temp forecast is 38F. Almost ideal sleeping conditions if the dew point stays dry.
The Pacific Crest Trail 