Date: 9/25/16 Miles: 19.8 Total Miles: 2650.1 It began like any other day: morning coffee from the warmth of my sleeping bag followed by deflating and rolling up my sleeping pad, and stuffing my few belongings one by one into my pack before emerging from my tent to take it down once more. The only…
Pacific Crest Trail 2016
Confessions of a Chacoholic
Date: 9/24/16 Miles: 19.3 Total Miles: 2638.8 I love Chacos. True story: I own 8 pairs of them. Two pairs hiked the Appalachian Trail, two have hiked the John Muir Trail and the Wonderland Trail twice, and three have now hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Combined they’ve been my companions for well north of 5,000…
Liquid Sunshine
Date: 9/23/16 Miles: 21.1 Total Miles: 2619.5 Well, it started out promising anyway. Bright stars and the Milky Way had illuminated the night sky as I cinched up the sleeping bag around me last night, and although a layer of clouds had moved into the valley below us by morning, the red flare of the…
The American Alps
Date: 9/22/16 Miles: 21.2 Total Miles: 2598.4 The clear skies that we’d fallen asleep to were the same ones we woke to, but somewhere in between we had yet another dose of overnight rain. Fortunately, it was the last we would see of the wet stuff for the rest of the day. Under the newfound…
Final Resupply
Date: 9/21/16 Miles: 7.8 Total Miles: 2577.2 With only a short nearo planned out of town this afternoon, there was plenty of time to enjoy Stehekin and its beauty. Sitting by the water’s edge and staring into the valley that leads back to the trail and the jagged peaks of the North Cascades, I thought…
Stehekin
Date: 9/20/16 Miles: 19.5 Total Miles: 2569.4 The snow of yesterday evening and the cold that came with it lingered all through the night, with an occasional new dusting adding to the blanket of white that now clung to everything. By the small hours of the morning, however, the sky was filled with nothing but…
Mental Endurance
Date: 9/19/16 Miles: 23.6 Total Miles: 2549.9 The moon was bright and clear in its corner of the sky as it rose above the shoulder of the mountain we camped high upon last night, but it didn’t last–it too was soon swallowed by the clouds that cast a light but cold rain down on my…
Thank You Sunshine
Date: 9/18/16 Miles: 20.1 Total Miles: 2526.3 It was an exhausting night trying to keep things as dry as possible, and sleep came only in short spurts. The sweetest sound of the morning wasn’t even a sound at all but rather the absence of one: the absence of rain falling on the tent. It was…
The Rain Wins Again
Date: 9/17/16 Miles: 22.0 Total Miles: 2506.2 Well, that sucked. The fact that I never even turned my phone on, let alone used it to take a single picture, tells the story of the day about as well as I can. From the moment I began hiking to the moment I stopped, the rain was…
Crimson and Gold
Date: 9/16/16 Miles: 22.6 Total Miles: 2484.2 When I think back on the 12 or 13 hours between the start and end of hiking each day, it’s remarkable how many different phases it can take on. Like a play in multiple acts, there are often high points and low points, internal conflicts and resolutions. Today…
