PCT Day 123 to 125
August 31 to September 2, 2021
Mile: 2224.9 to 2229.9 (5.0 miles)
Start: Crowded campsite at Trout Lake Creek
Finish: Hotel room in Trout Lake Valley Inn, Trout Lake, Washington
At 4:30am several loud hikers in our crowded campsite woke up and decided to have a noisy conversation in the dark so loud that even my earplugs couldn’t drown them out. I mean we were all shoved into a campsite that had capacity for a third of the hikers actually camped there so I guess it was to be expected that we were going to have to deal with all the joys and noises that come with sharing overcrowded campsites. I was not the happiest camper this morning having gone to bed trying to drown out the sounds of Stinky Fingers the exhibitionist in her tent and now was waking up to clueless hikers yelling in the dark at 4:30am. I guess we could’ve hiked up and over a steep mountain in the dark to dry camp last night but we were pretty exhausted by the time we’d reached the only reliable water source in a 5 mile radius. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” I reminded myself in my head.
Our alarm was due to go off at 5:30am anyways so I read for a while before waking up Shannon. Another set of hikers started packing up their tents around 5am but were whispering which was thoughtful of them to keep their voices down and not wake up the other people camped near them. 5:30 came and we tore down our tent, leaving at 6:15am to hike the 5 miles to a Forest Service road that led 18 or so miles into the tiny trail town of Trout Lake, Washington. We had found out the day prior that the citizens of Trout Lake were such incredible and organized Trail Angels that they had established 4 daily volunteer-run shuttles to and from the PCT to town. Supposedly the shuttles leaving the PCT ran at 8:30, 10:30, 3:30 and 5:30pm to town and with the huge group of hikers camped around us, we hoped to get a spot on the first shuttle to town to ensure we got a spot. Traffic was supposedly few and far between on the Forest Service road so hitchhiking would probably be pretty tough and we’d take a free ride whenever we could.
Shannon and I wanted to put as much distance as we could between the crowded hiker bubble and Stinky Fingers so we ran-hiked the 5 miles to the road in the cold morning woods. On the uphill I started pouring sweat despite being able to see our breath, so I stripped to my t-shirt and shorts and was a much happier camper. We passed by a couple who were decked out in tights, hats, gloves and jackets and stared at my t-shirt and shorts ensemble like I was crazy. They were also headed to the shuttle and we later learned that their trail names were “Bill Nye the Hiking Guy” and I forgot the girl’s name but dubbed her “Foraging Queen” as she was obsessed with eating wild food on the trail. As we waited for the shuttle together, Foraging Queen and I compared notes on the food we’ve foraged on the trail so far and she even had me try some edible bright red berries that I’d never eaten before called Bunchberries. They were a little bitter and tasted like popcorn kernels which wasn’t too appetizing but now I know in a pinch that I can eat them.
At the forest road we met two older ladies section hiking from Bellingham, Washington (aka practically Canada) who were absolutely charming. They were the ones who were up at 4:30am talking loudly and had the tent with the string lights last night that looked mysterious and magical. All was forgiven when we chatted with Mosey and Aria whose spritely energy and sense of humor were wonderfully refreshing. Shannon and I went to warm up in the chilly morning air by picking berries in the huckleberry bushes on the side of the trail when all of a sudden we heard the most amazingly clear soprano voice trilling some sort of heavenly song in Latin. I turned my head in confusion and saw Aria standing in a ray of sunshine, her breath clouding in the mist as she serenaded us unworthy PCT hikers with music. We were spellbound and after a while Aria finished her mini morning opera and we clapped and cheered. I’d never quite had an experience like this before on trail but was sure glad that we woke up early to catch the first shuttle to town with these ladies!
We said goodbye to Mosey and Aria who had just caught a ride with a random Trail Angel and his dog headed to town who had pulled over when he saw the ladies shivering and dancing to keep warm. What a hoot those gals were! A little before 8:30am, the official Trout Lake volunteer shuttle arrived, dropping off several PCT hikers who looked familiar from the tiny town. Bill Nye the Hiking Guy and Foraging Queen were just ducking into town quickly as they had to finish the trail by September 16th in order to make it to a wedding that weekend. It didn’t sound too fun that they had to do a minimum of 25 miles a day for the next 3 weeks to make it to Canada but they were up to the challenge. I was hoping Shannon and I would be able to enjoy the trail the next few weeks and not have to hike back-to-back marathons regularly as we had to do at the end of the Appalachian Trail. You definitely get the miles done but it isn’t very fun.
Gary was the volunteer this morning driving PCT hikers into town and we had a very enjoyable ride. I was so intrigued by his life up here as he had been a forest firefighter, a ranger and lived next to Mount St. Helens when the volcano blew up in 1980! He told us that his house had been right on the border of the evacuation zone surrounding the erupting volcano so he was able to stay and see some crazy things. When the lava exploded out the side of Mount St. Helens, it burst a lake which flooded a river near where Gary lived. He saw a steel bridge be demolished in one fell swoop of the muddy deluge and the rushing water picked up his neighbor’s entire house, spinning it around before dumping it back down a bit downstream. We also learned from Gary that lady elk are called “cows” and not does and the male elk are “bulls” and not bucks.
When we arrived into town, we thanked Gary for volunteering his time and donated some money for gas. He said when he used to just give thru-hikers rides before the whole operation was organized by a team of volunteers, some seasons he’d give upwards of 700 hikers rides just by himself! He definitely appreciated the gas money and the volunteer schedule so he wasn’t having to spend 6 to 8 hours a day driving smelly hikers around.
We got dropped off at the hiker friendly grocery store where we set down our packs in the backyard and met Fluffy the cat who apparently was the resident mouse hunter and thru-hiker support animal. The brother of the grocery store owner was out moving gallon bags of huckleberries to cold storage and we chatted him up. The Trout Lake Grocery Store paid $10/lb for huckleberries and each bag held about 6 lb of berries which meant he was holding about $360 of berries. I started thinking about how delicious the berries would taste but then also remembered how much we overdid the huckleberries yesterday and decided in town that I would use this time to detox. The brother was an interesting character who made us laugh so much when he yelled at the cute cat, “Fluffy you ate 3 mice the past couple days – you are so fat!” Fluffy looked up at him, trilling happily and wiggling her large furry cat bottom.
The brother of the General Store owner and a hippie gal from Israel got into a heated discussion about the Burning Man festival down in the deserts of California. I really enjoyed hearing his honest (and hilarious) commentary about the hippie festival having never attended it before. Sounded to me like Burning Man was just a lot of naked people doing drugs and burning stuff in the desert except in recent years with the severe drought you weren’t allowed to burn anything because it would probably cause a forest fire. Now it just sounded like Burning Man was still just a bunch of naked people doing drugs in the desert except with lasers and LED lights. Honestly it didn’t sound too different from the PCT thru-hiker crowd we’d met in SoCal at the very interesting Deep Creek Hot Springs. Why would you go spend $600 just to get into Burning Man when you could save yourself some money and have essentially the same experience plus natural hot springs at Deep Creek?
We left the two festival goers behind to grab some homecooked breakfast from the Station Cafe and warm up inside the restaurant. Mosey and Aria were already digging into their food when we showed up and sat across from them. After a hot greasy breakfast we all went back over to the grocery store to find our resupply boxes and relax in the glorious sunshine. Trout Lake is such a small town they don’t even have a traffic light but do have excellent people watching, especially from the benches behind the General Store. We were excited to join our new friends Mosey and Aria to people watch as they unpacked their resupply boxes that they picked up at the General Store. Shannon and I went inside the shop to find our resupply boxes that my Mom had mailed to us on the trail. Sometimes the tiny Trout Lake Post Office gets swamped with so many hiker packages that they all can’t fit in the storage room so the overflow boxes go over to the General Store. We ventured back and forth between the Post Office and store where they both said that my resupply package wasn’t there.
I was a little nervous that my food box had gotten lost and the General Store had very limited gluten free options with 5 or 6 tough days of hiking until the next resupply point. It was only a couple years ago that I’d found out that I had a gluten sensitivity which was making me so sick, bloated and depressed that I often could barely get myself out of bed whenever I’d eat something with wheat, rye or barley in it. Prior to starting our hike, I had spent many days planning out where gluten-free options were going to be located or limited on the 2,650 miles of trail. I’d reviewed photos, websites and guidebook info on each town’s grocery store, researched gluten-free recipes, purchased GF meals and snacks in bulk for the cheapest prices I could find, unpacked dozens of boxes, sorted through hundreds (if not thousands) of food items and repacked 6 months of GF food addressed to random places I’d never even heard of before. Hopefully this resupply package had made it to Trout Lake since it was sent over 2 weeks ago.
After pulling up my resupply box tracking number on my phone, seeing the error message on the USPS website and then asking the post office lady about what the error meant, the postmaster was able to dig through the shelves and finally locate my box. Thank goodness! I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to subsist solely on instant mashed potatoes, beef jerky, huckleberries and wild mushrooms for the next 100 miles of hiking.
I rejoined Mosey and Aria behind the grocery store where we spent the next couple hours unpacking our boxes, sharing hiking stories and laughing with them. Mosey had the exact same colored Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer puffy jacket as me which we bonded over. Apparently Mosey’s daughter was a semi-famous hiker in the backpacking community and she showed us pictures of her daughter on the website and trailers of a famous ultralight gear company at PCT Trail Days this year. It was really cool!
Mosey also touted the virtues of carrying an empty gallon plastic jug with the top cut off that you could use for scooping water out of a creek, collecting berries, Hiker Trash showers and a bunch of other things. Aria hyped up the usefulness of having a sponge to wash your legs and clean up after a long day on the trail. It was really great hanging out with the two ladies and we sure learned a lot from them. I hope we catch up to them on the trail as they’re only doing a couple hundred miles this time around. Their tight schedule had them getting back on the trail later this afternoon so it would be a quick in and out of town for them whereas we’d stay for a day or two. As the ladies were getting ready to leave, Shannon and I tidied up the hiker boxes outside of the store, throwing out trash that had accumulated and sorted food from gear so hikers in need could easily grab the items that they needed.
We said our goodbyes to Mosey and Aria as they boarded a giant yellow school bus that was apparently the Trout Lake hiker shuttle along with about 20 other hikers. I couldn’t believe it! Gary’s PCT shuttle this morning was just a 5-seater truck and now a full length school bus was bringing PCT hikers back to the trail like it was a class field trip. After the bus left, Shannon and I walked over to the famous Trout Lake taco truck that was only open 3 random days a week and ordered some cheap delicious lunch made with love and yummy salsa. As we were eating our food back at the General Store’s hiker hangout, we chatted up a couple of hikers who were emptying random snacks into a nasty beat up gallon bag filled with seeds, trail mix, pretzels – you name it. One of the hikers said she’d been refilling her “Hiker Trash Trail Mix” concoction since the Mexican border and it had never been empty since mile 0 – we were now well past mile 2,200! Some of the items found in the bag were not just your standard good ol’ raisins and peanuts but apparently there were marijuana edibles, magic mushrooms and playing cards shoved in there as well. Yikes! You never knew what you were going to grab out of the Hiker Trash Trail Mix. I wasn’t about to take my chances even touching the nasty trail mix bag and politely declined when some was offered. Who knew what was growing in there at this point!
Not wanting to hear more about Burning Man, fat-shaming cats or magic mushroom trail mix, Shannon and I left the PCT hiker hangout behind the Trout Lake General Store and walked a mile out of town to the idyllic Trout Lake Valley Inn. We spent the next couple of days resting in the peaceful oasis at the hotel and it was the first time in months that I finally felt like I was able to truly relax and shed all the anxieties I was still carrying with me from my former job and life. It was too difficult to leave the calmness and coziness of the inn so we decided to double-zero (aka take 2 days off in a row where you hike 0 miles) in Trout Lake where life went by at a much slower pace.
We rested our tired legs in the hotel’s hot tub where a recent photo of a curious marmot hanging out by the jacuzzi hanging from the wall made us smile. In the mornings we’d chow down on homecooked breakfast, coffee and tea under the watchful eye of Flipper the bison calf whose taxidermied head was mounted on the wall. During the day we’d borrow the free single-speed bikes at the hotel to go into town, pedaling past the vibrant green fields of happy cows grazing in the sunshine under the towering glacier-covered peak of Mount Adams. At night we cooked dinner on the hotel’s gas grill (the charcoal grill was off limits due to extreme fire danger) making Beyond Beef burgers, fresh-picked corn, pea shoot salad and tomatoes from a local farm. A creek flowed through the shaded property and a hammock nestled amongst the trees making it idyllic and irresistible for naptime. It was going to be so difficult to leave this place!
Our PCT hiker friend Twilight was staying a few rooms down from us with several friends, including a guy from Long Island and a gal from Washington who were super funny. We drank outside by the grill with them, catching up on trail gossip and getting to know each other better which was fun. One of their friends wasn’t feeling too hot so he was resting up in the hotel room. The crew warned us about the spell of Covid running rampant through the thru-hikers after PCT Trail Days and recommended we keep safe by not getting lazy about avoiding other hikers in indoor settings, eating outside whenever possible and continuously washing our hands. Some of the people they’d run into on trail who had Covid seemed absolutely miserable. We really didn’t want to end up in the backcountry not being able to breathe and puking our guts out like some of the other PCT hikers that Twilight’s crew had encountered. How horrific would it be to catch Covid while thru-hiking, have the symptoms get so bad that you could barely function and find yourself tens of miles away from the nearest road let alone the nearest hospital. No thank you!
While resting in the town of Trout Lake, we were also able to catch up on news since we finally had internet service and some cellphone data. We found out that with all the hundreds of ongoing wildfires up and down the west coast that as a preventative measure the US Forest Service closed down all of the National Forests in California. Along with National Park fire closures, this meant that literally all of the Pacific Crest Trail in California was now off limits to anyone except firefighter and emergency personnel. Due to extreme fire danger, well over 1,800 miles or two-thirds of the entire PCT was now closed for the foreseeable future to backpackers.
It was insane that this much of the PCT was closed indefinitely but honestly a good move on the Forest Service’s part. I don’t believe that much of the PCT had ever been closed before but many of the wildfires recently popping up had been started by humans either on purpose or accidentally. With the busy Labor Day Weekend coming up and Covid limiting indoor activities, everyone wanted to be outside celebrating the end of summer which meant illegal campfires, fireworks, cigarettes tossed into the brush – all fire starting risks. Even trash tossed on the side of the road like broken glass or the shiny concave bottoms of beer cans can act like a magnifying glass and concentrate the sunlight into a small area that ignites the bone-dry brush. I guess with all the resources and money poured into already fighting the million acres currently on fire in the west, enough was enough.
Unfortunately these fire closures in the state of California and the southern half of Oregon meant that many of the PCT southbound hikers were going to be forced to end their 6-month-long hiking trips immediately. There was no way that many of the Southbounders would be able to make it through Northern California and through the Sierra Nevadas before the snows fell in early or mid-October. We felt their pain as we had to already skip hundreds of miles of trail due to fires and smoke causing toxic air quality. Another year we’d have to come back and hike the burned sections of trail. Even though we were far north of California, we hadn’t escaped fire danger yet. There were still two large sections of trail north of us in Washington that were at risk of being closed to hikers due to wildfire.
We also found out that the entire town of South Lake Tahoe in California and neighboring towns in Nevada were being evacuated from a new fire that had sprung up a week or two ago. We had stayed with our friend Brad in Tahoe where we’d all experienced the lovely effects of wildfire smoke inhalation from the monster Dixie Fire burning a hundred miles to the northwest. Brad said the smoke from this new Caldor Fire was pretty bad on Sunday morning but nothing he hadn’t seen before. The next thing he knew, Sunday afternoon he was being mandated to evacuate the area immediately, taking only the things that he could quickly pack and his dog, leaving behind his newly renovated house. It was touch and go for a few days as hotels across the border in Nevada filled up with displaced residents. Everything was so dry in Tahoe and the winds were so strong that the Caldor Fire moved like lightning, searing forests to a crisp and burning down entire towns. Every few hours we were searching the US wildfire maps on Inciweb.nwcg.org to see if the fire borders had moved and if Brad’s house was still outside the edge of the inferno. We’d have to keep an eye on it but luckily Brad, his dog and his neighbors had all been able to escape with their lives from the fire because of modern-day technology providing early warnings to evacuate.
