Amelia Bikes

August 27

Miles: 26.8

Mile Markers: 2411.1 – 2437.8

Miles to Canada: 218.0

Listening to: ENHYPEN – Brought the Heat Back

I lost my Chapstick yesterday. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, and in my normal everyday life, I probably wouldn’t care, I’d just buy another one. But this was a tube of the blue Blisstex chapstick, and it’s hard to find it in the tube, rather than the heavy little jar. I had ordered it from Amazon, and had the same tube with me on the whole trail. It’s the absolute best chapstick for very chapped lips, which mine are now. Anyway, I lost it yesterday, and I’m still upset about it. I’m still mad about the rocks. I’m still tired.

We all got up and started hiking. Warpaint and Crib got up early and started hiking before everyone, and then Rocky left camp, but Bap, Roses, and Fonda were behind me when I left. There’s more fucking rocks on this trail now. It’s just all rocks. My ankle hurts so badly. Every step is this sharp pain. I’m so frustrated. I’m so sick of this.

Bap, Roses and Rocky all caught up to me all at the same time and asked How are you girl? and I said I told them how my ankle hurt and I was just frustrated and how I had lost my Chapstick. I was just venting, and I didn’t expect them to do anything, but Bap pulled a Chapstick out of his pocket and said here you can have this, I haven’t used it since the Sierra. Roses pulled out some ibuprofen and said here, take some ibuprofen. Rocky pulled out some leukotape and Do you want to tape your ankle? These really are trail angels. I felt like crying. I love these people with all my heart, and I would do anything for them.

I kept walking, and was in better spirits. It was only one more mile to a waterfall where I could soak my foot in the cold water and re-tape my foot before continuing on.

Today we’re hiking about 27 miles, and there’s about 5,000 ft of ascent which is insane. Yesterday now feels like a rest day.

Tomorrow will be a little bit brutal as well. Another 20 mile day with 5,000 ft of ascent and then the last day to get to Steven’s pass will be about 14 miles with I think 3,000 ft of ascent – another “rest day” if you will.

I keep wondering if I could have hiked the entire trail. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not in this go around. Maybe if I tried it again I could do it, but do I want to? Do I need to? Do I need to prove anything to anybody? Would I even want to do another thru hike? I’m not sure. Maybe a small one? I would do the JMT – that’s only 210 miles. Only.

There’s a trail on Vancouver Island called the Vancouver Island Trail that I think is about 600 miles, but I don’t think it’s finished yet. I don’t know that I have any desire to do it, but it is there if I ever wanted to.

The tramily has been talking about reunion trips already. So far, we want to go skiing in Lake Tahoe, go on a sailing charter in the Caribbean (we already have a captain!), hike the JMT if we can get permits, hike the Wonderland Trail if we can get permits (that one’s only 100 miles), go to Oktoberfest.

I hope we stay friends forever. I was talking to Roses the other day when she came into my room to take a shower about these kinds of friendships, and how different they are from friendships we have in our normal lives, where everyone’s so busy and it’s always like oh, let’s make plans, but it’s always a month out and maybe it will never happen. People cancel. You don’t spend all of your time together everyday. These friendships that we have here, are like grade school, or college friends. They’re more childlike. They’re more fun, but they do go deeper as well – I know things about my trail family that I don’t think they talk about, even with their friends at home. Even though I don’t know about these friends and what they are like in normal life, I don’t know what kind of clothes they wear because I’ve only ever seen them in a single outfit. I don’t even know some of their last names. It’s weird to think of them by their government names. Alyssa, Joe, Charles, Rene, Gunner, Lisa, who are those people? It’s funny to think of them driving their cars to work, going grocery shopping. I don’t know what their friends at home are like.

The friendships we have now are timeless, in this little bubble, that I want to hold on to forever and I hope we can still go on these trips like always come back to that little bubble together.

We continued on and got to a waterfall where we took a break, and I stopped to soak my feet in the water. It sort of helped. The water was really cold, and then I retaped my ankles with Rocky’s leukotape, and it felt a little bit better after that.

We had to go up 2,000 ft of ascent over 4 miles which is just a lot. Just straight up, tons of switchbacks. Whoever is maintaining the trails in Washington loves putting fucking rocks everywhere. Even on parts of the trail where there’s no rocks there naturally, there’s still rocks in the trail for some reason. I never saw this many rocks on any other part of the trail except maybe in the Sierra, where there were just lots of rocks in general, but someone didn’t purposely put them there.

Today is extremely hot and humid, but at least it’s overcast, so I guess it could be worse. I feel bad, but I’m just not enjoying hiking on this section. I don’t want to do this anymore. I hate these fucking rocks. My ankle hurts. I’m tired.

But I’m so close. I am so so close to being done, and finishing the trail, and I can’t quit now.

I listened to music on the way up the climb, and it sort of helped, but rather than my moody crooning indie music, I listen to some K-pop. I need energy. At the end of each switchback, I rewarded myself with a few dance moves that I could remember from the music videos.

Before I left for the trail, I was taking K-pop dance classes, which are really fun, and each week at the studio, they’d have a different song and we learned the dance from the music video, and then you could record it if you wanted. I can’t wait to go back to dance classes.

At the top of the climb, there was a pond that Fonda, Bap, Rocky and Roses were sitting at, and we had lunch. We talked about our fears of the trail ending, and what life would be like afterwards. I think that reality is setting in now, and it’s on more people’s minds more and more, everyday that we’re closer to the end.

I think most of them are a lot more sad than I am about the trail coming to an end. I tend to compartmentalize my feelings and have a delayed reaction until after the fact, and then I process everything, so maybe it will hit me later. But I’ve had a lot of challenges on the trail that most people haven’t had.

There are certain things I will miss for sure – the simplicity of my day, where I’m mostly just walking and then think about food and water and where to sleep, looking at maps, which I love to do. But I won’t miss the pain. The constant pain in my body, this level of exhaustion, where I never feel rested, and I never feel 100% good. I won’t miss that at all.

I’ll miss my tramily a lot though. Having this group of people around all the time can be exhausting, but it can also be incredible. I feel so supported by them, and sometimes I do wonder maybe I could have done the whole trail if I had had a family like this from the beginning. But I really have struggled in the heat, and that’s a very real issue, so it’s not worth thinking about.

I wasn’t ready to leave the pond when everyone else did. I’m trying to rest a little longer instead of just getting up and starting to hike when everyone else starts to hike, because I never get a full rest and I’m not really resting as much as everyone else during the day because I hike slower. I do think my endurance has vastly improved because of this though because I’m not really resting during the day. I’m just pretty much hiking from the start to end with small breaks, but with these huge climbs I need to rest. I was surprised to find Bap, Roses and Rocky sitting on a rock shortly after the pond. I do hike slower, but not by that much 

Mama Warpaint had brought a bunch of candy to Snoqualmie for us, and I took some Sour Patch Kids and ate some on the way up the ascent, and I think that helped. I’ve tried not to eat too much sugar on the trail because all of the Clif bars and dehydrated meals have a lot of sugar already. But now that I’m hiking a lot more miles and these ascents are brutal, I need more calories, more energy. I’m now routinely burning over 4,000 calories a day, which does feel kind of impossible to keep up with. I eat two servings of Mountain House meals for lunch and dinner. So each meal is about a thousand calories each, and then I’m eating at least three or four bars of some kind which is also about a thousand calories, and then there’s snacks. But it’s like how much food can you eat?

My legs look so much leaner just over the last week, and my arms look a lot smaller, but I don’t think I look skinny. My legs are completely jacked, and I’ve received a lot of comments on them over the last week especially. Perhaps that’s why all these section hikers and weekend hikers are just automatically assuming I’m a thru hiker now – my bulging thigh and calf muscles.

Up at the top of the ascent, my right hip started hurting with every step. There’s like this pain at the front of my leg which I think is my IT band, or maybe another labral tear? I wish I was already a physical therapist and had taken all the anatomy classes I need to take.

I really need a rest day. Originally, I wasn’t planning on going into Leavenworth, but I think I will now. Warpaint’s parents rented another Airbnb for all of us in Leavenworth which was so generous and so nice. So we’ll get to take a zero day there which will be fun. I think if I can push myself to get there, the rest day will be really nice. 

I do think I’m going to skip Stehekin though because I really don’t want to be pushing like this everyday, doing all these miles plus huge ascents and decents every single day. I don’t think I can do it. My plan is to just go slow and hike at my own pace and limit the ascents to about 3,000 feet per day, so I’ll probably be behind everybody before they get to Stehekin, and then hopefully I’ll be ahead of them after they come back, and then we’ll meet up and hike the last section together. 

I figured it would be very easy to just keep pushing on the very very final day of the entire trail. By then, I think I’ll just want to be done.

After the trail, we’re going to have a party at my house until everyone needs to leave to the airport for their respective lights home. One last blowout. I’m excited! It’ll be really fun so just hang out and not have to hike. 

I had originally only wanted to hike 22 miles today, but the group was hiking 27, which meant a final uphill climb of about 1,500 more feet. I’ve really been pushing myself to stay and keep up with them, and I decided to try hiking but by the end of the day I just felt so exhausted. I had already hiked 4,000 ft and this would be another 1,500.

I wasn’t enjoying hiking at all. I hated all the rocks. I hated how humid it was. How fucking hot it was still at 6:00 p.m. my leg hurts, my ankle hurts. I feel bad, but I fucking hate hiking in Washington right now.

It started raining, and I put my poncho on and just felt really hot and wet and sweating completely dripping down my face as I climbed up that stupid hill. Rocky went ahead then I was alone. I was the very last person. There was a tent site a little ways up the climb, and I thought I would just stop there for the night. But when I got there, all the tent states were full, so I kept going, hoping that there would be something else, but there was nothing. It was just bushes on a slanted hill. There was nowhere to set up a tent at all so I had to keep hiking, and by then it was starting to get dark. I was exhausted and every step felt painful, but by then I was just hiking on adrenaline. There was one comment about a side trail and there being some tent sites so I went up the side trail and there was just nothing. It was just blow downs, rocks, a steep hill and bushes. There were no fucking tent sites at all. I was so exhausted, and started getting so angry. I started hiking back to the trail and just kept going because there was absolutely nowhere to camp, so I ended up making it all the way to where everyone else had camped – 0.1 miles before them. I had to cross the river in the dark just with my headlamp, and on the other side, there was a flat spot for a tent so I set up my tent. I was too tired to find exactly where the group was or to even cook food, and then it was past 9pm, but I needed to eat something because tomorrow would be just as brutal of a day. So I made some ramen.

My brother had sent a Garmin message asking if everything was all right because I hadn’t checked in for the night yet. In the morning, I send a text that says checking in, leaving for the day and then usually when I get to my camp spot I send another check in saying that I’m done hiking for the day and these check-ins include coordinates so my brother always has a record of where I camped. I just wrote back. Still hiking. I fucking hate this section and he wrote back. There’s big climbs you can do it. Hang in there bro.

I sent Roses and Rocky a message saying that I was camped at that mile marker near the river but I wasn’t sure if I could hike the 22 mi the next day because that would be another 5,500 ft of ascent and 5,000 ft of decent.

I really want to hike with this group, but this is fucking insane, and I’m not really enjoying it, and I don’t really want to hike like this. I feel like I’m just destroyed at the end of the day. I get to camp and it’s dark. I’m exhausted. I don’t have any time to wind down before bed, and then I have to wake up early and do it all over again. This just brings me back to a very bad place where I have no rest for my body. I don’t think I can do this.

Before bed, I kept looking at the maps trying to figure out if I skipped Stehekin, and skipped Leavenworth, could I still finish the trail with them? But even then, I’m pushing my body beyond what I should be. No rest days, big miles, big climbs every single day. This is more grueling than the Sierra in some sense, because even in the Sierra, I only went over one pass per day, and I didn’t hike this many miles, and it wasn’t above 90°. I’m hiking more miles and doing two passes at least each day here in Washington that are just as big, just as steep. Not as much snow or high altitude but still very grueling in their own ways.

I don’t think it would feel so difficult if I were limiting the ascent that I was climbing everyday. I have a plan that finishes a trail at Hart’s Pass on September 9th, and I think the longest day is 24 miles but the highest climbs per day is about 3,000 to 4,000 although the very last day would be 5,000. Can I find some permutation of hiking and staying with my tramily?

Before I went to bed, I turned off all my alarms, my 4:45 a.m. alarm my 5:00 a.m. alarm my 5:30 a.m. alarm and my 6:00 a.m. alarm. I’m not waking up early. I need to sleep. I’m fucking exhausted.

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