PCT day 89 - mile 2001 to mile 2023

"It was this time when COVID first hit when everyone got into the preppers mentality and started to buy out toilet paper, guns and bullets in shops. I had a gun already so me and Nessa went out and bought bunch of psychedelics" Eric.

I woke up in Eric's RV van at 6:30am and munched on pringles while editing the blog for half an hour. About 7am I heard rumbling in the house so I assumed Eric woke up, we agreed to head out back to trail at 7:30am. I packed all my things and went outside, he came out and asked me if I wanted to have a  breakfast but I was pretty full after all the various meals I had yesterday so we only had a coffee. While driving back he blasted Mastodons tune called Oblivion, I downloaded it later on to my phone, it was pretty good.

Eric got me back to the trail head,, for all the help he provided me with he didn't want any money in return. Perhaps he and Nessa will come to England one day I will be able to return the favour. On that note, we exchanged the contact numbers and shook hands. It was a pleasure meeting him and his girlfriend in this quite unexpected circumstances.

I started hiking at about 8:30am but had to make various stops as the application I was using for payments called Revolut decided to give me problems as well. If I lost access to it, that would make the rest of the trip extremely difficult. Eventually I managed to regain access, props to the programmers, they installed a lot of common sense lieu ways to do it. I do recommend this app when going abroad it has many useful features, it's easy to use and leaves you in control of your funds.

The decision has been made in the meantime to actually go through the Lionshead fire closure, the 20 miles stretch of trail closed two years ago and still officially out of bounds for hikers. After consulting Tank Top, Fomo, Mountain Goat and Zohan they all agreed that they will be going through it no matter what. On top of that I got a text message from Mooch that she went over it successfully yesterday and didn't experience any problems. I decided to stop few miles from the closure tonight and go through it tomorrow, exiting the closure at some point in the afternoon.

Trail today was actually way more difficult that I anticipated, a lot of snow on steep sides of the mountain slopes made for few difficult traverses slipping out of which would result in a serious injury. Luckily it only covered about two miles of the trail. I also met couple more people that will be going over the closure tomorrow which is encouraging, fingers crossed it will all go well, it looks like there's no further obstructions (other than snow) after this closure until the Canadian border.

Next stop should be town called Government Camp in 70 miles so roughly three days of walking and after that comes a very interesting place from one of the famous horror movies I'm looking forward to see but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Baby lizzard I found under a log while setting up the camp:
Three Fingered Jack:
Eric:
Mt Jefferson:

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