Day 132

Trail miles: 15

Side trail miles: 10

Total: 2198.8

First hill of the day was about 4 miles and I didn’t stop until the top because I wanted to eat my cliff bar at the top. On the downhill, I was pretty much sleepwalking. The overcast and rainy weather put me to sleep. I stopped to have coffee and out my rain cover on and found this beautiful overlook. We all sat and enjoyed it for a bit. Then we kept moving to the junction at the bottom of the hill where we had lunch. Raechel read in the comments that the road walk would take you to a huge waterfall called Panther Creek Falls and cut off 6 miles of the PCT. All 10 miles of road walk was uphill, which was sad because road walking is bad enough. Someone picked us up after a few miles and drove us to the falls in her truckbed! At the falls, we met a middle school adventure group. The kids were wily of course, but not a bother. The chaperones were really impressed with our hike. The man came all the way from Egypt to work a job and hopefully hike the PCT next summer. Seeing people so enthusiastic about our accomplishments make it worth it. We stopped at the creek along the road on the way back and filtered enough to dry camp once we met back up with the PCT. The next 3.5 road miles were brutal. A lot of uphill gain and tough cement to walk on. I had to take a break at the turnoff, where we still had a couple miles to the campground. Not too far in, a trail angel stopped to give us a ride! Her name was Bugs and she drops off lots of food for hikers and picks up garbage too. She’s more like a super trail angel. Lifeguard and I squeezed in the back with a cooler, and Krista got the front. Brad and Raechel got beers for the rest of their road walk they insisted on hiking. She was willing to come back and get them if they wanted. She threw one of the coolers on the roof without tying it down, which I couldn’t see how that would work. Then she floored it over a bump in the gravel road and it went flying. Luckily for me, she gave us the Dr Peppers that were ready to explode from the fall. She put the cooler in the woods and said “I’ll get that on the way back.” I’m so grateful for her generosity! With all the shortcuts and hitches, I got to camp at 5:30pm, which is plenty of time to do my exercises Blaze gave me. For dinner, I made boxed pasta salad, which turned out well, but didn’t taste all that great. Maybe less mayonnaise next time.