Day 35: Onward

Date: Tue 5/22

PCT Start Mile: 478.2

PCT End Mile: 498.2

PCT Mileage for Day: 20

Total PCT Mileage: 498.2

The Highlights: a full day on trail, ant break, and a rain catchment water source

We did indeed sleep pretty well last night and the morning began with pancakes and coffee, so a great start to the day. Terrie has group photos taken of everyone that comes through and just as we were about to say cheese, she mooned us. Casa de Luna!!!

Down the road, we got a hitch right away from a man in a white pick-up truck who pulled over for all the hikers along the way and delivered us all to the trailhead. Nice guy.

The day started cold again, with a decent wind blowing the fog into us on the mountain. This kept us nice and cool for the early miles, which included a long uphill stretch. It was after 10am before the fog burned away into blue sunny skies.

After 10 miles, we took a lunch break with Dead Zone and several others she was hiking with: Excel, Tinkle, CactAss (she garnered this name from sitting on a cactus), and Florian (still without a trail name).

The afternoon hiking was mostly nice and easy, with plenty of breeze, shade, and fairly level – or easy rolling – trail.

Shawn and I took another break about two hours after lunch. We must have managed to sit near an anthill because when we got up our packs were crawling with ants. We spent several minutes brushing them off before getting underway again. Such a relaxing break.

Our camp tonight is an actual campground – Sawmill Camp – just a basic campground with picnic tables, fire pits, pit toilets, and trash receptacles, but no running water.

For water, we hiked ourselves up another hill to the south of the campground, across a dirt road, and up a trail over another hill to the Sawmill Water Tank, a rain catchment tank under a low corrugated roof. With the tank only about half full (or less) we had to reach in pretty far to collect the water. This process looked like this:

Back down at our campsite, LOL and Squishy had arrived. Several hikers are spread out here tonight, a good stop at twenty miles from Casa de Luna.

There have been some comments left about this campground that there is a “pesky bear” in the area, so most hikers are using bear bags to hang our food from tree limbs. We have ours all strung up. LOL is using her food bag as a pillow, so we know where the bear will go first.

Tomorrow we have another 20 mile day and plan to start early, so lights out 🙂