Legs and Borders

Busy and hot day on the trail, we ended up walking over 30 miles Camp Host pushed few miles ahead, hopefully we will be able to catch him tomorrow before the end line. Plan is to set up tents 15 miles before the border and slack pack it leaving most of the gear inside of it. It's going to be another long day but it should work out ok as we will be carrying less weight - I will still take all my food with me in case a bear or a mouse will decide to break in while I'm gone. We met a lot of people coming back from the border today (you have to backtrack 30 miles from it to the Harts Pass as the Canadian side is closed), there's quite a few Northbounders who decided to flip flop the hike (go southbound to eventually reach the point they stopped hiking north) because of the fires in Oregon, they hope that by the time they finish walking Washington fire situation will get better. Tomorrow is indeed the last day of my PCT adventure, I'm sure in the days to come I will have bet...

I've woke up still a little bit hangover at 6:15 in the morning, the bus was leaving Stehekin at 8am which gave me enough time to have a hiker box breakfast, I've mixed too many things though and it came out disgusting, I still ate 3/4 of it. Bus arrived on time but the driver said that he is fully booked, he can take us to the bakery two miles down the road though and potentially pick us up later, since we didn't have any better option we said yes, payed 5$ and hopped in. Everybody wanted to stop at the bakery anyway. I had a cinnamon roll an apple pie and a coffee once we arrived, the roll was seriously one of the finest pieces of baking I ever had, it was divine. Apple pie was average though and the coffee quite bad, that cinnamon roll though, yummy! After 20 minutes myself, Tank Top and Camp Host decided that we could actually try to catch a hitchhike to the trail head instead of waiting for the bus which would save us some time and money. We got it quite lucky, the fam...

Long day to get me within the hiking distance to the 9am shuttle to Stehekin tomorrow. Weather was on the edge the entire day, the forecast was predicting the rain and it did rain slightly few times throughout the day but I guess we've been walking away from the clouds so it never got bad and some shade provided by them worked out really well. The 3200 feet ascent wasn't as bad as yesterday's big climb thanks to the lack of overgrowth and being more gradual overall. The blow down trees were present all day long though providing us with all sort of problem solving activities. Once we climbed out of the treeline the scenery became breathtaking, I think the ridge we could see to our left around the Fortress Mountain and Martin Peak is my favourite one of the entire trail, just looking at it makes you want to go and walk it somehow, I doubt there's any trail that goes over it. A beautiful beast though. I saw what might have been the oldest person so far on the trail while w...

"Keep in mind that Canadian Mounties ride moose, not horses. They ask that you do not approach quickly since the creatures, though well trained, startle more easily." Kodak Grind towards Stehekin continued today and as we walked Washington was showing us some claws. First of all after an hour climb with a gorgeous sunrise in the background, I went through the first pass of the day and it was too early. Night was quite cold and all the snow has frozen, making the first few traverses sketchy and time consuming. Next on the menu was a massive descent through a scenic valley which ended with a section full of blow down trees and a river crossing (it had a stone hopping/log walking option this time). Then there was another arduous climb to the top of the Fire Creek Pass which was full of snow on the descent, all slushy by now, so there was a lot of sliding involved. By that point I was running out of steam, but there was yet another climb to be done! 2500 feet up over 4 miles. To ...

"Humans rarely smile without having some robust reason to do so." Alain de Botton. Long day of hiking with some great views throughout the day, access to water was reasonable and mosquitoes although present didn't come in a death swarms (until the campsite that is). I've met few new nobo thru hikers the bubbles are intersecting once again. I've managed to cut the distance to Steheken our next and final stop before the Canadian border to 72 miles, town is so remote that both people I got hitchhike with yesterday although living in the area and loving hiking has never been to. It's only accessible from the trail, by horse or four wheel drive, there's no road leading in or out of it. It should be an interesting stop, my only worry is that there might be not much resupply there, there's no shop as such but the hotel has few food items they sell, I will have to rely heavily on the hiker box. Worse come to worse I'll just live on mash potatoes for three ...

It was a fairly uneventful day. I went past Lucky's tent in the morning surprised to see it as I thought he would have pushed further with Tank Top and others. He told me later during the day that he took a wrong turn, lost few miles and decided to camp just before a big climb we've been doing in the morning. It was really hot all day but apparently it's the last day of heatwave and temperatures will be dropping tomorrow, thank God. I've been drinking water like an elephant all day, stopping at nearly every water source available. Speaking of water, we had a big stream crossings today which had to be forded, it reminded me of the ones in Sierra Nevada. It definitely wasn't fun, luckily there was few other people around in case something went wrong. This section of the trail seems very busy, we are overlapping with Southbound PCT hikers and day/weekend hikers which is quite cool, there's a lot of friendly faces I can say "happy trails" to. I got 22 mile...

We woke up at 7am at George's house in North Bend, had a breakfast said our goodbyes to Fomo and got a lift back to Snoqualmie Pass, Zohan decided to have a zero day as he got a slight shin split. George dropped us off at Chevron gas station quarter mile from the trail, I had a coffee, everyone bought bits and bobs of resupply they have been missing and we went back on trail. It was ungodly hot today and walking on open ridges wasn't helping at all. I stayed well behind everyone else and didn't make good progress today but it was just enough, on top of the above there was a lot of altitude gaining so I'm happy with where I ended up today. At one point during the day we've been going on the ridge where military F16's were flying over a long valley and right on top of us Top Gun style, it was pretty impressive! You had to spot them beforehand because when you heard their sound the plane was already gone over the hill. I took a video of it, unfortunately the pilot ...