Marble Mountain Wilderness and so many others, and the hospitable towns and people along the way. We have never hiked any of the PCT in Oregon and we are psyched! It's a relatively small state in comparison to California, only 400 some odd miles, but it should be a great one between a relatively flat grade, beautiful vistas and fantastic trail towns.
The PCT must have heard about our last blog entry because the scenery got epic in the last 150 miles since Shasta. We hiked through four wilderness areas (Castle Crags, Shasta-Trinity Alps, Russian, and Marble Mountain) in slightly cooler heat (90s not 100s).
Castle Crags is close to Mount Shasta and despite being 8,000 or so feet lower than the big mountain, it towered over us at the beginning of our 5,000 foot climb up from I-5. In what's becoming a regular ritual, we left town late and hiked ten miles starting in the late afternoon. It was still 100 degrees at 4:30pm. You can tell how excited we were to hike out.
Luckily the next day the temperature cooled down, the wind picked up and we were rocking and rolling. The wind wasn't loud enough to mask the rattle of a baby rattlesnake telling us to get out of the way. We did. Quickly.
Castle Crags
Someone decided that kilometers was the way to go... Hikers disagreed
Looking back towards the crags from up high
Weird plant stuff
Ridges for days
Ridge hiking
The Shasta-Trinity Alps are an incredible wilderness area that I was lucky enough to explore during a high school summer with Ben Jacobs. As you can see I was thrilled to be back more than a decade later.
In case you are curious about the headband, it's a Buff and one of the more handy pieces of clothing we carry. Sometimes we use it to keep the sweat out of our eyes, sometimes to soak in streams to keep us cool, sometimes to use as a hat.
We ran into Coppertone again towards the end of a day and enjoyed a root beer float right before sunset. It was ideal. Until we got a little cell service and realized our Spot messages weren't going through. Battery problem we hope.
Mount Shasta
The Alps
Lakes and alps
Alps again
Tree is hungry
Russian Wilderness
We hit some great trail magic right before we hiked into the Russian Wilderness from a triple crowner (hiked the PCT, AT and CDT) named Steady and her husband Steve. They drove out from Oklahoma to provide trail magic to hikers in this hot and dry section of Northern California. When we hit the small paved road in the middle of the mountains we were not expecting to see anyone at all, which is pretty common out here. Instead: blankets, cold sodas and Gatorade, cold candy and trash. Have I mentioned that taking our trash is a huge gift? Especially when you forgot to throw out your old fuel canister and left town with three bags of chips.
Best of all, we ran into Garfield a friend from day one on the trail. The last time we'd seen him was in Mammoth, nearly 700 miles ago. The next night we camped at a lake where we also saw Checkmate and Kevin, who had first introduced us to the State of Jefferson where we now reside temporarily.
Marble Mountain has a beautiful new sign
Marble Mountain was the surprising winner of the section: we were up high walking on gorgeous ridge nearly the whole time.
Jenny hit her big milestone
However blow downs were frustratingly common
What goes up must come down eventually, and down we went through a burn area along Grider Creek through overgrown trail and poison oak.
On the way down into Seiad Valley we ran into friends from our 2014 hike who were doing a section that they didn't complete then. As we walked by, Jolly Llama surprised us from his sleeping bag with "Lance-a-lot? Cache-Money?" -- our trail names from 2014. Jolly is just that, Jolly, and we were thrilled to see him. We were so thrilled that Jenny terrified a bear a hundred feet away which bounded down the mountain away from us. Jenny's first wilderness bear sighting on the trail. Sadly Jolly was getting off trail because of knee pain but we hope to meet up in Ashland.
We met up with a few other friends from 2014 once we got to the campground thruhikers camped in before a 6 mile road walk to Seiad Valley. One Track and Gourmet were hanging out with a few other hikers when we stumbled in a little after 8pm. It looks like we should get the chance to hang out a bit over the next few days through Ashland. We finally learned the answer to a question we had been pondering since 2014: they had actually gotten the beer we had left for them at White Pass.
Here in the real State of Jefferson there's a big difference from the Shastafarians: it's a tiny town with lots of trucks and a fairly vocal dislike of the federal government given the omnipresent "no monument" signs around town.
The cafe in town is an institution and the home of the famous pancake challenge: if you eat 5 pancakes you get them free. The catch: they each weigh one pound. Even for thruhikers that's a tall enough order that only one hiker has won in the last eight years. We've got to give it up to them, we had some excellent milkshakes, eggs and waffles. The place was completely overrun with hikers.
Miraculously, despite being 4-5 days ahead of schedule and another address error, most of our packages made it in time. Yes, Jenny ate a ton of mandarin oranges (thanks Sharon!). Our schedule should be updated in our Google doc by Friday (thanks Jamie!).
Its 4:30pm here in Seiad Valley and its getting hotter!! It's currently 101 outside, and we have a 4,500 foot climb out of here.
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Location:Seiad Valley
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