Except when it isn’t!
Honestly, this week’s storms mostly served to remind me how insanely lucky we’ve been with the weather so far. And yes, it’s unfortunate that they hit the one time I did not have my rain jacket (it’s not supposed to rain in California!) but still, it left me counting my blessings.
The other more positive milestone that happened in the last section was reaching the long-awaited halfway marker. Really it feels as though we’re we’ll past halfway – partly because my maniacal master plan (incomprehensible iPhone note) is now mapped out until halfway through Oregon, and partly because we’re going so much faster now that time-wise, at least, we don’t have much longer to go.
So what’s changed in the last 1350 miles? I smell inexplicable about 90% of the time. There’s dirt so deeply ingrained in my skin I fear it might never come out. My leg hair is bleached white by the sun. It’s also so long you could brush it. There’s not an ounce of fat on my body – I look like one of those anatomical drawings with all the skin ripped off, all sinew and muscle and gristle. It’s fascinating, and also disgusting. I’ve always wondered what I’d look like if I stopped drinking wine and started exercising. But it’s like the time I decided to see what I’d look like if I cut all my hair off à la Fantine in Les Miserables. I’m glad I know, and I never want to look like that again.
One thing hasn’t changed. I still get up at 5am every morning and hike my stupid ass off. Whether I want to or not.
Day Seventy-eight, miles 1244.6-1265.2
The whole crew were up and at em bright and early today, even Tofu, who doesn’t usually make an appearance until 7am. Town day will do that to you. To avoid going another round with the gorse bushes we took the road detour around the fire damage, and after a few miles we were back on the PCT, shins mostly intact. The trail descended alongside the Feather River on one side and then ascended up the other for a long, slow seven miles, but we were soon at the trailhead waiting for Tofu’s friends to come pick us up and take us to their ‘cabin’. I use quotation marks here because it was about as much a cabin as a yacht is a sailboat. Only in the US. But hey, I wasn’t complaining.
After a tour of the palatial house we’d be staying in which in normal life I wouldn’t even be able to afford on Air BnB, we settled in for a dinner of loaded sweet potatoes and peach crisp while Tofu’s friends interrogated us about life on the trail. I never get tired of seeing the horrified looks on people’s faces when we detail what our day to day looks like. We unpacked our respective resupplies onto the kitchen floor and they went around judging each of them. I thought I’d won when they spied my bag of baked goods (comprising roughly half of the total volume of my food bag) but in the end, Aquaman took the crown. I think he won because his was the most aesthetically pleasing, which it only was because he eats the same thing every day, for weeks on end. So I guess I’m being punished for being creative. The classic refrain of the struggling artist.
Day Seventy-nine, zero miles
I started the day by eating yoghurt in bed, one of those random foods you don’t think you’ll miss until you can’t have it any more. Tofu and her friends then made a huge breakfast spread (second breakfast is my favourite meal) and then I cleared everyone’s plates under the guise of being helpful but actually so I could eat all the scraps they’d left behind. What? You wouldn’t want it to go to waste, would you?
The others headed out to the lake while I stayed behind, my only desire for the day to sit alone in silence and stare into space for a bit. When that got boring I reverted to my other favourite activity: planning ridiculously far ahead on the trail. I opened a bottle of wine at 4pm and Dracula made an aperitivo of toasted pop tarts – as Brits, we’ve only ever had them cold as trail breakfast, and let me tell you, I’m never going back – before we ate another delicious dinner and fell into bed, clutching our stomachs.
Day Eighty, miles 1265.2-1298.1
We drove into Quincy in the morning for one last injection of town food before getting dropped at the trailhead. It was an emotional goodbye – mostly on Tofu’s end, but I also found myself tearing up. They’re not even my friends, but I guess I was having a premonition of eventually being reunited with all the people I love, even though it’s still months away. The tears quickly disappeared as we put all our energy into the four mile uphill start. The afternoon brought some eye candy in the form of two PCTA employees clearing blowdowns with a giant saw (it’s been a long time, okay?) and I had to drag myself away to start the long descent into Belden.
Aquaman had been banging on about Belden for the last week, dubbing it the ‘gem of NorCal’, and though I knew he was joking, I didn’t realise how much. Belden wasn’t a town so much as a resort, with a restaurant filled with a slightly creepy assortment of memorabilia and which looked like it had last been cleaned at the turn of the century. But it had a terrace overlooking the river, cold beer and an ashtray, so as far as I was concerned it was paradise. Tofu arrived an hour later and declared she wanted to camp there that night, though we’d planned to continue on. This was basically the first time she’d asked for anything – because she gets up later than us she is often just informed of a change in the plan (usually that we’re going to hike even further) and has to deal with it. So we agreed – it was far too nice sitting there getting gently drunk anyway. The climb out of Belden is notoriously horrendous, so we figured we might as well have fun while we could.
Day Eighty-one, miles 1298.1-1317.2
In preparation for the rigours of the day ahead, I ate a 700-calorie cinnamon roll intended to serve three (in what universe) and got going. The ascent out of Belden wasn’t steep per se – ‘just’ 4000ft – but over a gruelling thirteen miles, meaning about half the day was climbing, my least favourite activity. I’d been dreading it, freaking myself out with the comments on Far Out, but honestly it wasn’t so bad – it wildly overstayed its welcome, but I put a serious dent in my snack supply and listened to Tom Vitale’s memoir of working with Anthony Bourdain, and the story of Tony trying to cook coq au vin while aboard a riverboat in the Congo with a temperamental generator helped the time pass quickly. The only kicker was my new shoes and I were having creative differences – they thought that it would be cool if they made the soles of my feet feel as though I was walking through burning lava, and I did not. Hopefully it’s just teething problems; I’m planning on getting 800 miles out of this pair whether they (or I) like it or not.
Shortly after lunch I crested a hill to see miles upon miles of dead trees. It was like that scene in Jurassic World where Chris Pratt sees all those dead diplodocus’ after that mad genetically modified dinosaur has rampaged through them. Or like in Mulan when they’re right in the middle of singing A Girl Worth Fighting For and they come over the hill to see the Huns have slaughtered their whole army (if neither of these references mean anything to you, you need to take a good long look in the mirror). I hiked through the burn zone for a while, but it soon turned back into a live forest and then a ridge covered in hoodoo-style lava formations. At camp, I made cilantro-lime rice with wild Alaskan salmon. I wonder if Tony would be proud?
Day Eighty-two, miles 1317.2-1342.1
There were two main objectives for today – hit the halfway marker and then hitch into Chester for one of their famously gigantic milkshakes to celebrate. The day started with a climb up Butt Mountain (I refer you again to the question, who names these things?) and then it was a quick sprint downhill to the unassuming concrete post that marked 1350 miles from Mexico and another 1350 to Canada. I had a little sobbing fit, partly because of the insane achievement of having made it this far, partly because I knew I had to do it all over again. Okay, mostly the second one.
There were another eight miles to go to the highway to hitch into town, and as ever when motivated by food, I practically ran them, the pain in my feet magically disappearing at the prospect of eating my body weight in calories. Aquaman and I soon caught a ride and headed straight for Pine Shack Frosty and ordered milkshakes and jalapeño poppers, sneaking worried peeks at the darkening sky. We made our way back to the road and before we could even stick our thumbs out, a pickup truck driven by a dude smoking a cigar pulled over and asked if we wanted a ride. Thus we were on our way back to the trail, riding at what felt like 100mph in the bed of the pickup, holding onto our belongings for dear life. Definitely ranks in my top five most American experiences ever.
We’d just started hiking again when we heard a clap of thunder, and at the same time saw a dead tree crack and fall to the ground. With these bad omens spurring us on we spent nine miles trying to outrun the storm, and the rain started just as I’d jumped into my tent. We’d gotten away with it again.
Day Eighty-three, miles 1342.1-1371.1
Today’s hike would take us through Lassen Volcanic National park, and the morning began with a quick detour to a geyser, where grey water bubbled sluggishly as steam rose into the sky. You could tell Lassen had been stunning in its day – rows and rows of trees and waist high grasses with lava formations dotted around, but it had all been burnt to a crisp in a wildfire. There was a ranch just off trail that I was hoping to satisfy my never ending hunger at, but I arrived precisely between breakfast and lunch, so I sat on a picnic bench and abused their WiFi while eating my stupid boring snack and drinking my stupid boring water.
Yesterday’s storm clouds were still looming and it started to rain just as I’d been pondering a lunch stop, so I quickly constructed a pathetic, sagging structure from my tent fly and dove under it, where I was immediately joined by fifty mosquitos. My rain jacket, sitting in a post office in Burney fifty miles away – where I’d shipped it after carrying it for three months and using it exactly once – was presumably having a good laugh at my expense.
I sat chewing moodily on a stale bagel, wearing my tent like a shroud. The kicker was I couldn’t even stop for very long – Lassen has a bear can restriction, and mine was currently wending its way back to Kennedy Meadows, so I still had 15 miles to hike to get out of the park before I could stop for the day. It was just as well. Cathartic as a good sulk is, it would have been beneath me to call it a day after only 14 miles because of what could be described only in the most melodramatic sense as ‘drizzle’.
I took snack inventory, staring at a pack of Welch’s fruit snacks I’d been carrying for 300 miles before deciding I still wasn’t in the mood for them, then deconstructed the shelter. Or rather I waited five minutes for it to collapse on its own then deemed that the end of my lunch break. The rain continued on and off all afternoon, but the thunder was constant, following me along a vast plateau punctuated by endless charred trees. It was cool, in a creepy sort of way. I felt like I was a character in a video game about the end of the world, the blue sky winking tantalisingly up ahead but never coming any closer.
My shin started giving me grief in the last five miles so I half walked, half jogged the rest of the way, desperate to get the day over with. The trail opened up onto a view of a vast, jungle-like valley, mist hanging over the distant mountains. I made it to camp by 5.30 and repeated my cilantro rice salmon dinner, adding cheddar ritz crackers to great success. Aquaman informed me there was a gas station just off the trail tomorrow. I could barely sleep for excitement. It was like Christmas Eve.
Day Eighty-four, miles 1371.1-1398.3
The day began with a barely averted breakfast disaster when, in the dark of my tent, I mistook a bag of sweaty salami for a cinnamon roll. Heart still pounding at the near miss, I hiked out into the quiet morning, last night’s rain dripping gently from the trees. Maybe it was because we’d been hiking through burn zones for days, but the living forest looked particularly beautiful, glowing in the weak sunlight. Seven miles later I arrived at Old Station, which claimed to house a deli inside the gas station. The deli turned out to be a freezer full of burritos and a microwave, but whatever. Chef Mike heated up my breakfast and I helped myself to a Reese’s hot chocolate then sat on a bench outside with Dracula and Aquaman to consume the goods, returning soon after for another round. There was a dead owl in the parking lot, seemingly the most interesting thing that had happened in Old Station all year, given every passing car pulled up to take a look at it until a local finally grabbed it by the legs and tossed it into the trees. ‘This’ll be on the news tomorrow,’ said Aquaman, sipping his coffee.
We hiked back up the highway to return to trail, soon emerging at a viewpoint where we could see the shadow of Mount Shasta looming up ahead. A group of bikers took great interest in us and asked us tons of questions, my favourite of which was: ‘Why the hell are your legs so dirty?’ I don’t understand how you can explain to someone what hiking the PCT entails and they then expect you to look like you just stepped out of a Neutrogena advert. Like, did you hear the part where I said I just hiked 1350 miles?
The rest of the afternoon was spent hiking along a beautiful exposed ridge with views all around, the overcast weather making the lengthy water carry just about bearable. The last few miles took us down through fields of volcanic rocks before arriving at a campsite that looked more like the Serengeti than California, with gnarled trees poking up through yellowing grass and the misty blue mountains presiding over the scene. I spent an hour or so reading the rave reviews on Burney Mountain Guest Ranch, tomorrow’s destination, and fell asleep dreaming of soft serve ice cream. Again.
