Both Ed and I woke around 6:30 a.m. even though there was no need to wake up until at least 7:30, since we knew it would be raining until 9:30 and weren’t going to leave until then. So we sat in bed and read for a while. Then around 8:30 when the rain had mostly let up we walked out to the barbecue, pulled the eggs from the fridge, and made Egg McMuffins with cheese. It was pretty good.
We spent a fair bit of time fussing around in the bunkie, then Stripper pulled the pickup truck right up to the bunkie and knocked on the door and asked if we were ready. So then we hustled and got our gear into the truck and off we went. We had a 3000 ft climb to start the day. I had bought another tub of hummus and I had some leftover whole wheat rolls and we also brought all of the clementines that we had left, so we had lots of bread and clementines for lunch and I had three delicious hummus sandwiches. It was dripping at first and then later cloudy and eventually there was a little bit of blue sky and then it went back to mostly gray but at least dry. We only had about an 8 or 10 mile hike to the first shelter, and we settled in here around 3:00 p.m. The main challenge at this shelter is that there is no cable for hanging food, there is only a bear box, and apparently the bear box has mice in it so if you put food in there the mice will chew into your food. So after I set up my tent I spent a fair amount of time looking for a tree to hang my food from. Most of the trees in this area are 40 or 50 ft high before the first branch, so it took me half an hour to find a tree to hang my food in. I threw the rope up and left it there for when I was ready to hang. After I cvouled water for my dinner and was letting it cook in its insulated pouch, I put my food into the bug green bag and carried it up to the bear hang. It took me quite a while to even find where I had thrown it. And then once I pulled the bag all the way up, which is how you do a PCT hang, the bag refused to come back down and it took me a long time to untangle it.
After that was sorted out I came back down and sat at the picnic table and watched as more and more people arrived. There was even a family of four including daughters aged 9 and 4 who are doing the AT together. The three boys from Pennsylvania arrived as well. This shelter is quite small holding only about six people, so most of us are tenting. I enjoyed spending time at the table talking to various people, but it is getting cool now and supposed to go down to around 0 so I’m going to climb into bed and read for a while and then get some rest.
Other than photos of flowers, which I won’t bore you with, I only took two photos of a pretty brook. It was too cloudy to take any mounrain views.
