Day 94: Forest Fire

Date: Fri 7/20

PCT Start Mile: 1436.8

PCT End Mile: 1463.9

PCT Mileage for Day: 27.1

Total PCT Mileage: 1463.9

The Highlights: forest fire, Mt Shasta views, pesky deer

Smoke rising from a small forest fire not far from where we camped last night.

Luckily I only heard Flamingo snoring once last night when I woke up, and it wasn’t bad enough to keep me from falling asleep again. That said, I was very tired when my alarm went off and continued to sleep for another 15 minutes before beginning to pull myself together.

We had camped in an area that was fine fine powdery dust, which quite easily got all over everything. Just as soon as I’d wiped down the back of my pack, it fell into the dirt again. Ugh. Losing battle.

Leaving our tent site, we hadn’t walked very far when we rounded a bend on a ridge to see Flamingo staring into the distance. At first, I thought he was taking a picture of the sunrise. But then my eyes scanned left ahead to see a cloud of smoke billowing from the trees below. A forest fire.

Flamingo was already on the phone reporting it, luckily he had cell service on the ridge. Continuing down the trail, we passed right by the fire, which was about 10 yards off the trail.

At first we thought it was really small – a few flames creating a lot of smoke – and thought we may be able to put it out with some sand. But then we noticed more flames spread around the area, the fire a bit bigger than it had originally looked. With Flamingo reporting it, there wasn’t much else to do but get out of there. While it was currently calm, if the wind picked up, who knew how quickly it would spread.

Difficult to get a good picture of, but there were several patches of flames. The fire was maybe 10 yards from the trail.

A couple hours later we heard choppers in the sky and saw them circling the smoke billowing into the sky. I’m not sure if they were purely recon or also there to fight it; either way it seemed like pretty good response time from when Flamingo had called it in.

When we saw Flamingo later, he was pretty proud of himself, in the most subdued way possible. Flamingo is a super mellow guy. He talks in a slow, low voice that sounds like he is constantly stoned, though I’ve not actually seen him smoke, so this may just be how he speaks. When we saw him and mentioned the helicopters, his calm response, in the most mellow voice possible, was “awe yeah. I called in the air squad.”

There are several wildfires along/near trail areas further north that we have been keeping abreast of, and family members have also been sending us updates that they see/read, for which we are appreciative. It’s that time of year when the West is primed to go up like a tinder box.

Mt Shasta in the background.

The rest of our day was fairly uneventful, probably a good thing. The terrain undulated up and down, but there were no long major ascents or descents. We had terrific views of Mt Shasta and the majority of our hiking was fairly shaded, a huge bonus.

We hiked just over 27 miles before finding a tent site, setting up camp before 6pm. Totally awesome. Annoying insect of the day award goes to a bee that would not leave me alone while I was eating dinner, but also wouldn’t land long enough for me to kill it.

After getting all settled into the tent, we had a visitor. Reading the comments about this tent site, there was apparently a pesky deer that liked to come around.

Deer can be a nuisance for hikers. They like to lick the salt off your stuff and can really tear apart a backpack or the tops of trekking poles doing so. Anyway, it seemed the pesky deer had arrived. We scared it away several times but it kept coming back. Ugh. I feared this was going to be an all night fiasco. Until…. more hikers arrived.

Now we have three other hikers set up right around us, so I’m hoping that (1) maybe the deer will be less apt to come around with more bodies here, or (2) they will provide a nice buffer for us and the deer will go for their stuff first. Haaaa.

The tear in the shoulder of my shirt started very tiny and has grown very large. There is a matching one on the other side. Probably causes because my deltoids are just so massive. Or maybe from me contorting my arms to slap mosquitos and itch bites on my back. You decide. Either way, time to look for a new shirt.

Anyway, we seem to have bad luck with other hikers stopping to camp near us just as we are about to go to sleep. Then there is another hour of noise as they set up, cook, etc.

We actually camped next to two of them last night. The other guy we hadn’t met before, but he had a good video of the fire we passed this morning. When we had gone by just after 6am, the fire was still relatively small and about 10 yards from the trail. When he passed at 7:50am, it was much larger, and more like 10 feet from the trail. He thinks he may have been the last person to cross by it, as no one else came from behind him during the day, but it’s hard to say. Anyway, hopefully the “air squad” was able to put it out before it grew larger. No cell service tonight so we aren’t able to look up any new information.

We all talked about what the cause could have been and the general consensus was that it had to have been a careless hiker. There didn’t seem to be anything else that could have caused it – no storms or lightening in the area.

That said, the area that was burning did not appear to be a tent site, so it was unlikely that it would have been a smoldering campfire. Maybe someone careless with cigarette ashes? Hard to say. It likely started sometime the previous night as embers, growing into the flames we saw by morning.

But now- time for sleep. Hopefully we won’t get anymore visits from the pesky deer while we sleep.