July 31
Miles: 15.8
Mile Markers: 1955.5 – 1971.3
Miles to Canada: 684.5
This morning there were some raindrops falling on my tent so I tried to pack up a little quicker so I could put my tent away before it got wet again. My plan was to hike about 15 miles to a place called Linton Trailhead Junction which has some campsites. It’s also halfway between Mackenzie Pass which is where my friend Lava was getting dropped back off after going into town to Bend. We would meet there and camp together for a night. So exciting! Especially since she’s hiking SOBO and this is finally the place where we intersect on the trail.
I stopped to take a break in a meadow and two girls came up behind me. I saw one of them at Elk Lake and she looked familiar but I couldn’t really figure out where I knew her from. After I started talking to her, I then I realized I had met her way back in the desert when I was airing out my groundsheet the day I reached the McDonald’s. They stopped to take a break and sit with me for a minute and we talked about the conditions and the snow, and how one day, we would see a snow patch, and then that would be the last one we would ever see on the trail unless there was a lot of snow in Washington.
The girl I had met previously was named Roses, and the other girl was named Rocky. They continued on, and I assumed I’d never see them again because everyone who had been hiking near me has been way faster.
It’s raining today, just small droplets, and I can see blue sky in the distance. It’s a weird terrain. There’s partial burn areas, but then there’s all kinds of beautiful wildflowers – blues, purples, hot pinks, yellow, white, orange. Everything seems to be blooming. The other day I turned around the corner of the trail and probably 400 butterflies started flapping. I had disturbed them. They lay on the ground when they’re not flying around, and you almost can’t tell that they’re butterflies because they fold their wings together and they just look kind of gray, and blend in with the dirt. But once they start flapping, you see flashes of orange and black everywhere in the air.
This morning, there was a dead butterfly in the middle of the trail. Somebody had stepped on it. That made me extremely sad for some reason. It wasn’t folded down into a gray triangle. Its wings were folded open. You could see that there was a beautiful butterfly there and someone just trampled over it.
I love my poncho because it keeps me completely dry and I throw it over my backpack so my backpack stays dry too. I have all my important stuff in a trash bag inside of my backpack. So even if water were to get in, my stuff will still be dry. But having the poncho over the backpack is just another layer of managing water intrusion. I don’t like having a wet backpack inside my tent at night because it causes a lot more condensation and just wetness that I don’t want to deal with. So when I set up my tent, I prefer to have everything be dry inside.
There’s almost exactly 700 miles left of the trail as of today, which feels quite strange because 700 miles isn’t really that far in terms of what I’ve walked already, but in a way it’s almost halfway of what I will walk on the trail.
I came across Roses and Rocky again in a field full of flowers. Rocky wanted a new picture for her Hinge profile, so we took pictures of ourselves in the flowers. “Candid” pictures. We joked that this is how we like to hike – being able to stop and enjoy the flowers for 5 minutes. It’s not always about the miles.
I walked with Rocky and Roses for a while. It felt nice to hike with other people for once. They hiked a little faster than me, but not at a pace that I couldn’t keep up with. I think if my ankle felt better, I would have been completely fine. But it wasn’t uncomfortable. We got to a water stream and they asked if I wanted to have lunch with them, and I was planning on stopping there for lunch anyway so we sat for a while and they were telling me that there was another guy that they were hiking with who is also from Tacoma named Warpaint. That name sounded familiar, and I think maybe someone else had told me that he was from Tacoma as well but I never met him. A few minutes later, Warpaint, Crib and Bap showed up and we all had lunch together – the boys that Rocky and Roses had been hiking with. They never referred to themselves as a tramily though.
They were all really nice and down to earth people and I had a really great time chatting with them. It was one of the nicest conversations I’ve had with people on the trail.
They were all heading into Bend for 2 days and tried to get me to go with them, but I had a box waiting for me at Big Lake Youth Camp with my new shoes and an ankle brace which I really need. It’s also kind of a personal challenge for me not to leave the trail in all of Oregon, or at least the part of the trail that I’m hiking, which is 318 miles without going into town. I think that might be the longest stretch on the entire trail that I will have only stopped along the trail at these little resorts and places relying completely on the boxes that I’ve sent to myself. There’s something about that that I really like. It just feels like I’m really thru hiking and I’m really staying on the trail and not leaving to go have the conveniences of a hotel. I will have stayed in my tent every single night for 318 miles, and probably for most of Washington as well, because there’s very few towns and places with hotels along the way.
Which is just as well because I’ve spent an absolute fortune on the PCT so far. You would think that sleeping in the dirt in a tent would save you money, but it definitely hasn’t – between all the new shoes that I’ve had to buy, and staying in hotels in town while my foot was healing or taking a rest, or traveling back and forth between places, mailing things. I’ve spent a lot of money – including all the money I spent on food for the boxes that I didn’t send to myself ahead of time, and gear that I bought and then ended up swapping out because I actually needed something else. It’s been so much more money than I ever anticipated. A lot of the budgeting guidelines online are also completely out of date as well because since COVID, a lot of the towns just charge so much more money for hotels, for food, for fuel, for gear, and even for rides to and from the trail. Everything is so much more expensive.
I’d be lying if I said that money wasn’t a factor in my decision to skip Northern California as well, because it’s so hot there, and there’s tons of burned down sections, and to be super honest, I just don’t want to spend my money on that. I think I’d probably have a lot of the same heat related issues I’ve had on other sections and then I’d be getting off trail and having to pay for more hotels and things. I think that even just financially, it made sense to skip.
I got a decent severance package from Barclays, but only because I had worked there for so long – and that has for the most part funded my trip. But I am going back to school after this, and so I’m not going to be working full time, and so I do need to stretch my savings to cover school costs, housing and things like that for several years.
The boys went ahead, and I continued walking with Roses and Rocky for a while. We stopped to admire the butterflies, take pictures and videos of ourselves being surrounded by these magical little creatures. None of the videos came out very well and we gave up. None of the photos or videos ever really do the trail justice, and definitely not in this section of the trail at this particular moment.
We rounded a corner on the trail, and these white floating things started coming towards us through the air. The boys had been sitting on the trail behind the corner making a stockpile of snowballs from a stray snow pile and waiting for us for who knows how long. We grabbed a bunch of snow to throw at them but they ran down the trail, giggling. After the fire, after all the turmoil I’ve felt on the trail so many times, it felt nice to just experience something so playful and light, like a snowball fight.
We kept walking and got to a stream – the last stream before where I intended to set up my tent site. Rocky and Roses tried again to vortex me and try to get me to go to Bend, but I sadly declined the invite again and they continued on. They would catch up to me in a few days, so this wouldn’t be the last time I would see them.
I kept on up the hill to the junction and found an amazing campsite on the ridge with a view of one of the Sisters Mountains. I heard some rumbling thunder in the distance so I opted for a more sheltered site further down the hill that still had a nice view. There was nobody else there. A perfect end to one of the nicest days on trail so far.
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