PCT Day 122
August 30, 2021
Mile: 2206.3 to 2224.9 (18.6 miles)
Start: Blue Lake tentsite nestled in the huckleberries
Finish: Trout Lake Creek
The wind was roaring out of the mountains this morning, pulling thick clouds of cold damp fog down from the peaks and dumping it right atop the surface of the pond next to our tent. It was difficult to leave the warmth of the dry tent so instead of getting our bodies up and moving, we lingered in our sleeping bags reading books and journaling as we listened to the wind blow across the treetops. Eventually our stomachs started rumbling so we left the tent to cook breakfast underneath the pines. The head high huckleberry bushes blocked the worst of the wind coming off the lake but we still brought our sleeping bags outside to keep our legs warm. I had to get up to find some water I left outside the tent and on my way back to our cooking area I grabbed a handful of the dark blue berries to throw in our oatmeal and grits. The wild berries were insanely delicious and after we cleaned up breakfast, I couldn’t resist spending some extra time walking around the waterfront to fill up part of a plastic bag with more of the sweet juicy fruits.
Most of the huckleberry patches we’d been through in Washington so far had been thoroughly picked through by the PCT hiker bubble and other enterprising foragers. We heard that you could make decent money picking huckleberries so maybe some pickers had come through and cleared out the berries alongside the PCT to make a few extra bucks. Luckily whoever had been scooping up all the berries must have missed this side trail and left some huckleberries and blueberries for the rest of us to enjoy. I picked berries until about 11am while Shannon read his book since Shannon’s more of a berry eater and I have a little more self control to save some for later. We accumulated quite a few berries for snacks later, packed up our tent and put boots on the ground to get some miles under our belts.
As we headed back to the Pacific Crest Trail from our campsite, we ran into a couple of sweet older ladies out for a weekend backpacking trip who were very inquisitive about our hike. The first thing they asked was if we were okay or cold because our lips were stained blue. We laughed and held up our purple stained hands guiltily admitting that we’d spent the morning picking huckleberries instead of hiking. The ladies told us that they’d seen the young resident mountain goat clambering up and down the rocks across the lake which was so exciting that we immediately started scanning the mountainside for tufts of white fur. Hopefully we’d see a mountain goat on our thru-hike but that it would be from a distance where it wouldn’t decide to charge us.
Shannon and I left the lake area as the fog rolled in and settled, chilling us to the bone. As we warmed up with a fast paced stroll through the rolling hills, we passed by a family out backpacking with lots of stuff strapped on all over their packs and all sorts of hiking gear hanging off precariously. A few minutes after passing them, we found a children’s puffy jacket lying in the middle of the trail. Shannon dropped his pack and ran back down the trail with the jacket to reach the family before they hiked on too much further. Their kid was definitely going to need his jacket today with how cold and damp it was turning out to be. When Shannon reached the family, another group of hikers was nearby and everyone clapped like he was a big hero upon returning the jacket to the young kid who dropped it. High on completing his good deed for the day, Shannon waved goodbye to the family and sprinted back to his pack where I was waiting and picking berries. We celebrated reuniting the lost coat to the young backpacker and continued along the trail.
Unfortunately we had trouble hiking fast today because the Indian Heaven Wilderness had too many huckleberries and blueberries everywhere that distracted us. We’d be pushing a solid 3-3.5mph pace when all of a sudden our eyes would catch a glimpse of enormous navy blue huckleberries, shiny, juicy and irresistible. Shannon would tell me to hurry up as I dragged behind deep in the berry bushes but then his eyes would widen as he glimpsed the wild huckleberries the size of blueberries you find in the grocery store. We’d both stop in our tracks and immediately raid the huckleberry bushes, our mouths salivating as we picked handful after handful of glorious wild fruit shoveling the berries into our faces. Trails of deep violet and maroon juice ran down our fingers, coating our lips in a sticky purple lipstick that made us look hypothermic. A guy with a dog hiked by and did a double take as he saw our faces and hands coated in blue and violet juices.
“So you guys are the reason that there aren’t any huckleberries, huh?” the hiker teased us. We looked down at our hands, faces and clothes covered in berry juice. We were caught red-handed! Smiling, we laughed guiltily and chatted with the hiker for a while. Soon we realized that it was past noon already and we’d only done 2 or 3 miles so far which wasn’t going to cut it. Time to leave the huckleberries behind or we wouldn’t make it to Canada before the winter snows started!
Like true berry addicts, we only made it a few more miles before reaching the heavenly blueberry bushes of Lemei Lake. One taste of the low bush blueberries growing around the sandy lake and we were hooked on the delicious jammy flavor. I’d never tasted anything like this before in my entire life. The bright, large wild blueberries were intensely flavored and juicy beyond description. I think I may have just found my new favorite wild food. These berries must’ve been a different variety from the high alpine blueberry bushes we’d been snacking on while on trail and we shoveled handfuls into our mouths feeling like we’d struck gold. I decided that I would literally drive out to Washington State in the future just to pick pails of these berries – they were just that delicious!
Reluctantly we left the lakeside berry patch and continued on the trail. There was another alternate you could take today that was the same mileage as the PCT but scrambled up over a mountain peak called Sawtooth to get better views of Mount Adams, the second tallest mountain in Washington state. We were a little underwhelmed by PCT alternate trails after yesterday’s hot, dry, spider-filled slog on the dirt and pavement and looking at the elevation gains and comments by hikers preceding us, decided today we’d stick to the original route.
The alternate trails can be very scenic but it’s also a bit dangerous to take them if we became lost or injured as they’re off the Pacific Crest Trail. We’d told friends and family that we were hiking the PCT and if they didn’t hear from us, they’d tell Search and Rescue (SAR) personnel that we were on the PCT as we didn’t let them know we were deviating from the plan. SAR wouldn’t know that we’d gone off trail unless our family looked at our most recent GPS tracker points on our Garmin inReach Personal Locator Beacons. Unfortunately in the dense forests of southern Washington, we were having trouble with our inReach connecting with satellites and reliably sending GPS points. We decided the elevation gain up jagged Sawtooth Mountain and the off trail adventures weren’t worth it today.
One of my old work friends went to school in the Cincinnati, OH area with a guy who went missing in Washington on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2016. We’d heard from other PCT hikers that Kris “Sherpa” Fowler used to enjoy taking the alternate trails when he was thru-hiking which increased the search area tremendously when he went missing. He was last seen about 150 miles north of our current position in mid-October which is well into the “danger zone” hiking season in Washington when the winter snow season starts. It’s generally agreed upon in the PCT thru-hiking community that you need to reach Canada by the first week in October at the absolute latest or the danger of being trapped by blizzards increases exponentially with each passing day. At this point we still had about a month to get through Washington but we didn’t want to linger too long or go off trail too much in case the snows came early or we got lost or injured. Searching dozens of miles of PCT corridor is an enormous effort in itself, but adding all of the hundreds of miles of side trails and forest roads makes a search effort insanely more difficult. I hope one day Kris Fowler is found so his family and friends can have some closure. Now at five years past his disappearance, his tale is shared amongst PCT hikers to focus on finishing and not to stray too far from the main trail.
By mid-afternoon we’d burned off all the huckleberries and blueberries we’d gorged on this morning and our tummies were rumbling for some lunch (or so I thought). We stopped at the intersection of the PCT and Sawtooth Mountain alternate trail to chow down on some lentil rice at a lone tentsite. The wind had picked up significantly and we were glad we decided to skip the exposed alternate trail as we donned our winter hats, covered our legs with rain jackets and nestled behind a large tree trunk to avoid the cold air currents.
Shortly after lunch, the 400 or so huckleberries and blueberries that I’d eaten on trail hit hard and I had to run off to the woods behind our lunch spot to take care of business. I quickly picked my way through the fields of “forbidden huckleberries” behind camp that were likely unusually large from all of the thru-hiker fertilizer that they received every year courtesy of hiker-dug cat holes. I barely made it behind a large stump when I made the jaw-dropping discovery that eating 400 huckleberries is the magic number of berries needed to turn your poop blue. Laughing my butt off, I returned back to camp after burying the evidence, packing out my TP and washing up thoroughly with soap and water. Shannon looked at me curiously as I couldn’t stop laughing and shared with him the “colorful” experience that would soon be in store for him.
It reminded me of the time when we were kids and at a family cookout in New Hampshire, my little cousin Olivia discovered wild blueberries growing on a bush for the first time. We were all taking turns playing with her and showing her the blueberries that collectively no one realized how many berries she’d eaten over the course of the day but it was a lot. My Aunt Wendy said that Olivia’s diaper was purple for several days after the blueberry incident and almost had a heart attack when she changed it for the first time. Today we were reliving the blueberry dream, 20 years later on the PCT! I guess you could say some people never learn…
Highlights of the afternoon were finding a cave next to the trail that could’ve been part of a lava tube (an empty tunnel where molten lava once flowed), finding pieces of an intricate paper wasp nest on the ground, seeing beautiful fall colors start coming out in the fields, trekking through burned forests where the huckleberries actually seemed to taste sweeter as they grew from the ash and having nice flat packed dirt trail to hike quickly over. Lowlights of the afternoon was getting in a disagreement with Shannon about stupid stuff like signing both of our names in a hiker log book, feeling like I had a huckleberry hangover from eating so many berries this morning, figuring out if the next water source was reliable enough to drink our fill of our current water supply and stressing out over how we were going to get to the tiny town of Trout Lake tomorrow to resupply. We met a nice couple headed southbound with their small dog who despite his miniature size was a true mountain pup. They gave us the lowdown on the upcoming water and camping situation to the north while we shared with them info on water and tenting to the south. Looks like with the drought in the area that we’d have to stop a bit earlier than we originally thought in order to have enough water for dinner and breakfast.
Later in the afternoon, I spotted some edible bright orange Chicken-of-the-Woods mushrooms growing next to the trail a couple miles after leaving the boundaries of the Indian Heaven Wilderness where you needed permits to pick mushrooms. This choice edible fungus was so fluorescent and strikingly bright amongst the dark conifer shadows that it would be hard to miss the shelflike mushroom growing out of the tree trunk as it was practically glowing. We traipsed over to the trunk of the tree, judging the mushroom by sight to make sure it still was fresh and had tight pores underneath (not gills), smelling it to ensure it was fragrant and not rotten, and touching its springy damp flesh to determine if it was tender enough to eat and not too woody. It was an excellent quality mushroom and we were so excited to cut some off the tree for dinner that we forgot to take a picture of it.
We continued through dense forests where we passed by a truly enormous fir tree that would need probably 4 or 5 people with arms outstretched to encircle the thick trunk. Heavy strands of curly hanging moss dangled from the branches of the forests here and the forest canopy was so dense that it seemed like night was already here several hours before sunset. Shannon was deep in his podcasts and I was hooked on my audiobook thriller called “Dry” about the droughts in Southern California so the miles went quickly but it was still nearly dark by the time we reached camp. The tentsite had the only water for about 5 miles in either direction so most PCT hikers going into the town of Trout Lake tomorrow had stopped here and it was crowded af. There were probably about a dozen or so tents crammed into what was supposed to be 4 tentsites so we carefully snuck our way in between a couple of fallen logs only a couple feet from the next text over. Basically we were so close to our neighbor that we could hear him breathing as he journaled from his tent.
Shannon set up tent as darkness started to settle over the camp and I went to refill our water bottles, slipping on the slick rocks in the creek and nearly losing the cap of one of the bottles as the current took it downstream. My foot was soaked but luckily I had taken off my socks before slipping on my crocs to go down to the water and it dried quickly in the cool night air. One of the tents in the wooded campsites had solar powered LED fairy lights strung on the inside of it which was sort of magical to see as night settled in. Between our 2 stoves and 3 pots (well, more like 2.5 pots), we sautéed an appetizer of diced Chicken-of-the-Woods mushroom in olive oil, salt and pepper packets that we’d packed out. For entrees we cooked up mashed potatoes and ramen, drinks were pink flavored electrolyte drink mix and dessert was some of the huckleberries we collected this morning. The mushrooms were excellent and some of my favorite to cook up on trail with limited resources. They had just enough water in them to steam and not burn and were firm and so flavorful that if you closed your eyes, you really did think you were eating chunks of chicken.
Shannon and I cleaned up, deciding that from the previous hiker comments in the Guthook navigation app that we were going to hang our food instead of risking mice chewing holes in our tent. I hiked away from the busy camp to go pee and got so scared when a bunch of trees next to me creaked loudly that I nearly ran back down the trail with my pants down thinking it was a mountain lion or Bigfoot. Soon we settled in our tent and were enjoying a bit of reading and journaling when we heard a series of weird sounds coming from one of the tents. We peeked out to see what was going on and saw a nearby tent shaking. I groaned with disgust and Shannon cleared his throat loudly but it was to no avail. I loudly commented, “What the f***?!” not believing our terrible luck and the audacity of this b**ch who we’d run into before pulling this nasty crap.
At dinner we had spotted one of our least favorite hikers on trail who we dubbed “Stinky Fingers” as she liked to, um, sit next to the busy Pacific Crest Trail and do X-rated things to herself. We hadn’t seen her since a horrendously awkward encounter of running into her lying down right next to the trail with her hands down her pants in the Sierras. This was a 40+ year old woman from Los Angeles who had acted all high and mighty in town like her shit didn’t stink and had a serious know-it-all attitude to boot. On trail, she was even more of a nightmare with her lack of respect for people who don’t want to see (or hear) her taking care of her nasty self. After we’d run into her baring it all in the Sierras a good 4 days out from the last place to shower, she’d avoided Shannon and I like the plague to the point of even running out of restaurants in town since now we knew-it-all about her. I mean, if it were a guy doing that shit on the trail, everyone would be talking about the trail perv by name, warning each other to watch out for them or at least commenting on how unhygienic they were! Stinky Fingers didn’t even have the respect the first time we ran into her to at least hide behind the rocks 10 feet off the PCT to do her pervy stuff. This time she could care less that a dozen other hikers were trying to sleep next to her in the quiet woods. She must have been some sort of exhibitionist or weird pervert and we couldn’t wait to get the hell out of this campsite and away from her.
As I tried to drown out the nastiness of Stinky Fingers, I shoved in my earplugs, set our alarm for 5:30am to GTFO of our campsite as early as possible and busied myself by coming up with a poem to summarize the good parts of our day. Sometimes when you have to go through sucky things you just have to ground yourself by being grateful and thankful for what you do have. Here goes my attempt at PCT Shakespeare:
Ode to Huckleberries
Another step,
Another mile,
Another huckleberry,
Another smile.
Hiker beware –
What they say is true!
Too many huckleberries
Turns your BM blue.