PCT day 62 - mile 1292 to mile 1318

Me: I got a spare hot chocolate if anyone wants?
Mooch: Sure, does it come with 'hot'?

Today was a mixed bag of good, bad and ugly. I'm not quite sure if I liked it or not, it's probably somewhere in between.

I woke up early and it was still raining from last night, but it was light enough that I decided to wrap up the camp and go. Everyone else was still snoozing so I started alone. After half a hour one of the most peculiar things on the trail do far happened, an adult hawk swooped from the tree right on top of my head cawing like crazy, it looked like his nest was somewhere nearby and he was trying to scare me away. He repeated the swooping manoeuvre two more times and I had to duck away otherwise he would have hit my head. I actually got one of the attempts recorded on the camera. It was kind of awesome in a way, later on I read in the comments on Guthook (the GPS app) that it happened to other hikers as well. Poor angery bird made his nest right on top of a busy trail.

It stopped raining around 10am so I hanged my tent pieces on top of the backpack to dry, the weather couldn't decide which way to go and the forecast announcing 40% chance of rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon has never happened. But guess what happened instead? Snow! On the 18th of June, right on one of the hottest stretches of North California's Pacific Crest Trail, when the forecast was predicting thunderstorms and rain weather gods decided to bless us with the white powder and hail.

It also snowed the previous night on the higher elevation, so the most of today's hike we made in fresh soft snow, it almost felt like Christmas. Myself, Mooch, Alex and Ben ended up pushing good miles although we planned to go a bit further. We set up our tents 5 miles before PCT the half way point, tomorrow we will open the day with a big landmark to celebrate completing half of the trail!

There's a lot of wetness all around at the moment, the sun came out melting the snow from the tree branches, making them drip on us. We are coming down to town called Chester tomorrow, and I will most likely stay at the trail angels house for the night as my comfort vouchers has run out and need topping up.

Fresh last night's snow (we got it as rainfall during the night 2000 feet below):
Firemen hose left from the Dixie fire last year:

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