Day 120, 23 miles

This morning I had a slight pounding headache. The ground was very hard yesterday on the old service road, and I’m hoping it was because of bad sleep and not the smoke affecting me. I didn’t feel it later on in the day so hopefully it was unrelated!

Washington forest

The trail climbed more this morning, but overall, there wasn’t as much gain and loss as yesterday. I still can’t believe I did 30 yesterday! I feel very tired today and decided to just take it easy. I leapfrogged Omri for a bit but aside from that hiked solo all day.

I dropped my phone and it went 20ft down this sketchy loose graveled slope and thankfully stopped somehow! Another 5ft and it would’ve picked up a lot of momentum and been gone forever!

I feel like I missed out on this one :( 

Speaking of huckleberries, where are they?!? There were TONS of them around the Mt. Hood area, but for some reason, the bushes out here aren’t producing! I’ve been stoking people up for the Indian Heaven Wilderness for weeks, and now there’s no berries! I’m seriously confused as this spot is known for plentiful huckleberries during this specific time in August, I’ve seen it with my own eyes!

Maybe all this smoke is stunting huckleberry growth?

Around 11:00am I hit some trail magic! Fun Hog had soda, apples, HEIRLOOM TOMATOS!!, cookies, hard boiled eggs, and chicken! Omri was there and we hung out for about 20 minutes eating and talking with Fun Hog before moving on. As I was leaving the small dirt parking lot/trail head, I saw this posted on trail and my mood dropped again; I was reminded of the first of THREE fire closures coming up...

In this case, there was a fire near the PCT which shut it down, and an alternate popped up. Next, a fire popped up on the fire alternate!! So now there’s a fire alternate alternate!! Gah, what is this world coming to?! This means I’ll be swooping way around west on the alternate alternate, which will involve three different VERY poorly maintained/steep trails, and a long road walk on the highway into White Pass... By the way sorry for the bad handwriting, it’s hard to write on my tiny phone screen! 

While all of this is frustrating, I’ve accepted that it’s just the way life goes. More specifically, it’s the way Washington and Oregon are in the summers, ON FIRE!! I’m still going to do what I can (within an insane persons level of reason), to get to Canada via a continuos footpath from Mexico! Ok, enough of my yammering, back to the trail!!

About 20 miles into my day, I descended down a big hill and came across Blue Lake. It is so pretty and was calling my name to jump in and swim! It was only 2pm and the day was hot. Omri was already there and I had him take a sequence shot of me jumping in!

Blue Lake

A little while later, Alright came by, and I caught a cool sequence of him jumping in as well:

I love that third picture; it looks like he’s tip-toeing across the water!

I spent around 2 hours at the lake, and when I finally did leave I felt nice and lazy. About three miles later I found a nice lake offtrail with a cool hidden campsite near the shore. It was still pretty early, but I decided to stop and set myself up for a nice and easy 20 miles into Trout Lake tomorrow. I’m slowly chipping away at Washington, Canada here I come!

Thanks for reading!!