Legs and Borders

"I'm saving all my sleep for another life" TA Brian "The key to fulfilment is to make other people happy without hurting yourself in the process" TA Brian Today felt pretty special in many ways perhaps because of the summer solstice, perhaps of the places I've seen and people I met or the campsite we ended up staying at, it had it's tough moments as well. Firstly myself, Fomo, Rip and Smiley decided to take a detour to the inactive volcano called Cinder Cone few miles away from the trail, we met at the junction leading to it and proceeded with the plan, at the last moment another hiker called Zohan joined the fray as well. Road wasn't the easiest to navigate, fallen, burned trees were covering our path, the ground was very sandy which slowed the approach even further. After about an hour and a half we managed to climb the volcano and boy oh boy was it worth it! The landscape was like from another planet, very bare and dramatic, symmetry was ruling th...

Great day considering we were walking out of town. Everyone woke up just before 7am, Michelle and her husband started to make breakfast for us in preparation of which we helped. There was scrambled eggs with bacon, toasted bagels with jam and butter and a big mug of coffee - it was all I was expecting from a decent breakfast. There was a slight delay and confusion once the breakfast was over, everyone was deciding if they want to head out straight to trail or need to go back to town to resupply first. Myself, Fomo, Rip and Songbird decided to head back to trail since we had no more business in town and Hades, Pussycat, Cuppa and Jedi stayed in town. Michelle gave us ride back and we started hiking around 9:30am. Slight problem we faced was that after first 13 miles there was a 20 mile stretch of trail in which bear canisters were legally required to stay overnight, none of us had one. So technically we should have hiked to the closure, stayed overnight and then walk over the 20 miles s...

"I got my trail name when I ordered 250 bags of Yorkshire Tea from England, I just couldn't drink any other tea. I carry them all in my backpack" Cuppa. "I'm dislectic, one day I got drunk and decided to tattoo the number "116" on my arm to help me during the army drills, lots of Americans reads it now as "911" Pussycat. Only short stroll today but I hit a major landmark and decided to have a Nero in a town called Chester. The crew consisting of Mooch, Alex and Ben woke up with me at 5am and we set off twenty minutes later to reach the PCT midway point located five miles away. Weather was sunny but still cold and about two inches of snow were covering the path before us. We reached our destination at 8:30am took few pictures, signed the trail register and savoured this special moment for a moment, then there was time to pick up our backpacks and walking poles again and walk those few remaining miles to town. I walked a bit slower, stayed behin...

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 tr...

"One of the biggest problems while hitchhiking is having to talk to people making them feel like they didn't make a mistake picking you up. Even entertain them almost all of which is a great strain if you going all the way and don't plan to sleep in the hotels" Jack Kerouac. Great day with not so good ending. It was  rather easy in terms of hiking, not that much elevation gain and mostly going downhill to the town of Belden where I could have and potentially should have called it a day. The difference was that I met people I decided to hike out with. First if them was Mooch, an American girl living in Lake Tahoe, who actually hiked with Tom (I walked my first two weeks of PCT with him) I learned from her that his trail name is Cheeks, indeed because of his glorious butt cheeks! She also hiked with Tank Top, met Mama Troll and Courier etc. so we had a lot to talk about. Second person I met in Belden was Cuppa, a British guy from Manchester - very interesting person, he...