Day 100: 100 Days on Trail!!!

Date: Thu 7/26

PCT Start Mile: 1586.1

PCT End Mile: 1599.7

PCT Mileage for Day: 13.6

Total PCT Mileage: 1599.7

The Highlights: beautiful morning hike and into Etna

Clever title for this one, I know. But damn, we’ve been out here 100 days! In only a few short days we will be crossing into Oregon! You have no idea how excited we are about this. Everyone on the trail has serious border fever. We have all been in CA way too long and we can’t wait for the progress of crossing into the next state.

But for now… back to CA…

We rose early, on the trail by 5:30am. Town vision today … heading into Etna for our next resupply stop… but first, we had some hiking to do.

The trail today was again a roller coaster of rocky terrain as we headed through the Russian Wilderness. Oddly enough, the first/only Russians we have met on the trail camped next to us last night, right at the border of the Russian Wilderness. Coincidence? I think not…

After 13.7 miles of rocky ascents and descents, we hit Sawyer’s Bar Road, where we would hitch into the town of Etna.

A few other hikers were already waiting by the road. They had been there about 15 minutes and so far no cars had come by. We had heard that the hitch into Etna could be difficult, mostly because the road received very low traffic. However, when a car did come by, the pick up rate was about 100%.

So basically, you just needed a car to come by. Luckily, we only had to wait about ten minutes before a large white suburban pulled up with room for four, and we were on our way into Etna.

The guy that picked us up was Mike, a big guy with a long gray beard and long hair. He lived in Sawyer and had been retired almost ten years. Sawyer was tiny and he had to go to Etna for a grocery store or just about anything else he needed. He told us we were crazy and he didn’t understand the point of walking from Mexico to Canada. I like to be agreeable with those that give us hitches, so I told him that we were actually still trying to figure out the point ourselves, though that may actually be true.

As we drove into Etna, he honked at just about everyone he saw, a small enough town that everyone knows everyone.

The outskirts of town began as worn homes with unkempt lawns, the kind of scene of anywhere nowhere. Two deer stood at the front door stoop of one home. “She feeds them,” Mike said. A couple honks later, Mike motioned to another house, “I’ll stop and have a beer with him on the way home”, he said.

Once in downtown Etna, Mike gave us the brief tour – “post office is over there, the espresso place has sandwiches, lots of packs out front”, he motioned to the hiker backpacks on the sidewalk. “There’s a shitpot of you guys here this year,” he said, unbiased as to whether he cared about this or not. Just an observation. “This is the grocery store,” he pointed to Ray’s Food Place, “motel is down there, and the city park is just down that street,” he pointed to where hikers could camp for $5. And with a huge thank you from us, he dropped us off and was gone. I love the characters we meet when we hitch.

Etna is another great little small trail town, so tiny that everything you need is all right next door to each other, making it simple to grab a bite to eat, resupply foodstuffs, get new fuel canisters, visit the post office, etc – all relatively quickly.

We stopped into the Paystreak Brewery for lunch, which had good sandwiches and taps full of guest beers. They were in the process of moving and upgrading their own brewing tanks, so didn’t currently have any of their own beer on tap. Don’t worry, Shawn still found beers to drink.

While eating, we went through the resupply box we had sent to Etna, full of all the extras from the box we had received from our Virginia Beach friends Mike and Brenna back in Sierra City.

I remember originally going through that box on the porch of the Sierra City Country Store while some vegan jerkoff hiker from the trail spouted off about his ancient grains diet and the evils of sugar. Ugh, please go away, I’m trying to count my Starbursts. (Also, side note: I do not generalize vegans as jerkoffs, but this particular one surely was).

Anyway, between the rest of the food stuffs from the Sierra City leftovers and a few extra things we had from our last section, we needed very little to round out our resupply for the next ~5 day section to Ashland.

As we finished up our lunch, Rainman, Mustang, and Pitch arrived. They only planned to spend a few hours in town, eating, resupplying, and charging their phones/batteries before heading back to the trail in the evening. We talked with them for awhile before heading on to take care of some other errands. We were staying the night and leaving in the morning, so were anxious for lots of rest.

Before resting though, I went to the library to use the computer, or “do old person stuff”, as Squishy calls it. 😂 Sometimes it’s just nice to use a keyboard and pull up a million browser tabs so you can attempt to successfully order shoes!

While I’ve only been wearing them for about three and a half days, it’s already painfully clear that the shoes I bought in Mount Shasta are no bueno. So, I’m having the model that works for me (the Altra Timps) shipped to Ashland, our next major town stop.

I contacted every party involved in this order – Altra and the hotel the shoes are being shipped to – and confirmed every last detail. If I have the same shitshow that I did with my last shoe order, I will probably lose my mind. (No, I’m not ordering from Running Warehouse again).

For now, I need to survive five more days in my current shoes, which I thought were high cushion, but turned out to be low cushion. Like, very low. Hello, feeling of every single rock on the trail. They also aren’t as wide as the Timps, which is becoming painful.

Etna is a very sleepy town compared to Mount Shasta. It’s tiny and unlike Mount Shasta, where we saw hikers and locals everywhere in town, the streets here are absolutely empty. Like a ghost town, but you know there are plenty of people hiding somewhere. Likely everyone is hiding from the heat, since it was still 97 degrees at 6:30pm.