Mile 2491.9: cold, wet, and miserable

Miserable day. I've been cold and wet ever since we started hiking. Rather than the kinder fluctuations between sunny and sprinkling, the weather switched between drizzle and downpour. My rain gear is old, and apparently has lost it's waterproofing. I started coming up with names for my cold hands as they lost dexterity, such as Ricky Retardo and Dreadful Spiller. I couldn't light the stove to make hot cocoa, Micro had to do it for me.


- Typoed on my iPhone

Mile 2476.3: Stevens Pass shortcut, solo resupply in Faux-Bavaria

Paparazzi, Ghettoblast, Firehose, and Snacks (and more?) joined us after even Micro and I were holed up in our tents. Somehow, Micro and I managed to escape mice again while they attacked all of our camping compadres. The downpour fell equally on all of us though. Unfortunately, Nonstop and Maybelline's tent is now a complete P.O.S. and they spent the last two nights cold, wet, miserable, and covered in mice. The new theory is that Micro and I ARE the mice, we just morph in the middle of the night so we can eat other hiker's food.

We took a shortcut to the highway, cutting off 10 miles. Oh yeah! Damn it feels good to be a gangsta. Micro went west toward Skykomish, Baring, and the trail angel family known as the Dinsmores to relax, resupply, etc. I headed east to Leavenworth. I needed a new sleeping pad after the nozzle on mine gave up the ghost this morning. I was picked up by a super-nice woman with no sense of smell who owned a backcountry ski guiding company with her husband. The drive was long, but we held a super-good conversation. The town was crazy, all the storefronts are embellished to look like that kind of construction.

I got my sleeping pad, resupplied at the Safeway (the [S] cute-sie-used too), and tried to hitch back out of town. My chances seemed more and more dismal, until a woman who lives along the highway offered to take me as far as her house and let me sleep in her yard if I couldn't get a hitch before dark, which I couldn't. She fed me dinner and let me take a shower. Now I'm stretched out on the floor of her shop, next to our tent set up to dry, and evrytging else wet I own.


- Typoed on my iPhone

Mile 2445.8: a good shitty campspot and gentler Cascades.

When we got to Delate Creek, there was not much camping. The downside of hiking with other hikers is competing for tentspots, I suppose. Micro and I backtracked to a little shelf under a huge tree that she had seen in the midst of switchbacks, and we set up the tent there. It looked terrible: bumpy and small. It also had giant ants.

I woke up in the middle of the night with my sleeping pad completely flat. Then I realized that I was more comfortable in that moment than I ever had been before on the trail. The soft, thick layer of duff was gently spooning me. I slept like a baby.

When we passed the campspot with all the other hikers, we heard about their horror-story of a night. The place was infested with mice, Maybelline woke up to one on her face. It sounded awful. Nonstop was told, "Kill it! Kill it!" by Maybelline, but the rest of camp, when polled, was undecided. He looked at the mouse, and the mouse looked at him, and he went soft.

The day was uneventful. The rain of the night abated to a drizzle, then just fog, and brief sunshine, followed by more rain. The trail took us up and down countless switchbacks for a 2,200' climb and descent and more climbing. I night-hiked into Deep Lake with Nonstop and Maybelline, who was feeling sick after drinking too much coffee.

- Typoed on my iPhone

Mile 2420.6: Seattle resupply, Alpine Lakes

Another hectic, stressful zero day. So many items on the to-do list, so few completed.

Wr took Sweet 16 out to Tacoma to see her brother for some 1-on-1 time before he deploys, she was thoroughly disappointed with the experience. He took a nap and played World of Warcraft, and tried to refuse to do his share of the shuttling back to Seattle. I would have been very hurt and pissed; she said she would have had a better time staying in Seattle with Micro and I.

On the way back from dropping 16 off, Micro and I stopped at Goodwill. She had been giving me a hard time bcause all of my street clothes literally hung off of me. My Carhartts gave me a plumber's crack with no effort. I found a pair of Lucky jeans and a black cotton cardigan. It's exciting, I feel like I look good but not emaciated. It was also nice to wear COTTON!

Micro's dad dropped us off nice and early (leaving early being yet another stressful to-do in Seattle), and at the Chevron, we ran into Nonstop, Maybelline, Sunshine, Paparazzi, Splizzard, Jolly Green Giant, and the Youngbloods, Ghettoblast and Firehose. It was a party!

The climb out of Snoqualmie was not brutal, but it was never-ending. Thankfully, it was not raining, yet. Once we got up to the top of our multi-thousand foot climb: wow! The north Cascades really are imposing, and the Alpine Lakes Wilderness is beautiful. I ceased to enjoy it thoroughly because it started to drizzle, and we had a long, long, LONG daunting rocky traverse around a huge cirque.

I expected to do climb up and over the next available pass once we topped the ridge, but instead, we took switchbacks down for miles.



- Typoed on my iPhone

Mile 2401.7: night hike first

We had 25 miles to do today, and Micro's dad was going to meet us at 6:30 at Snoqualmie Pass. In order to make that happen, Micro and I woke up at 4:30 and hiked together for the whole day. I felt bad that she had to wake up early and hike slow in order for us to make our rendezvous time, but she insisted that she wanted to.

We started hiking in the pitch-black, and watched the horizon get splashed with color, blaze brighter, and finally the sun come up. It was really beautiful. We passed lots of blueberry and huckleberry bushes, I practiced my stealth-nab: not stopping to pick, but deftly grabbing one as I trot by. It sounds cool in those words, and feels cool when it works, but I mostly just get empty or purple fingers.

It started drizzling 1-2 hours before we got down to Snoqualmie Pass and I-90, and going downhill through rocky stretches hurt my knee so bad, but it was hard to be miserable with a warm, dry car so close. We made it to the pass by 5:35, and thanks to cell service, Micro's dad was waiting for us.

As we loitered in the parking lot, a guy rode his bike-trailer up to us and started talking. He had a straggly white beard and leathery skin, he was missing most of his teeth, and those that were there were sharp and brown as coffee with just a splash of cream. His clear-blue eyes had teeny-tiny pupils. From looks alone, I would have called him a crazy old meth-head homeless guy, but he told us he had just finished hiking the Appalachian Trail last year, he road a bike from Maine to Washington this year, and now he's going to ride down to the Mexican border so he can hike the PCT next year. He kept telling us how much harder the AT is than the PCT. I'm fully aware that the AT goes straight up, over, and down steep mountains on rocky, rooted trails, and I have no desire to ever do it myself, but I do wonder what he'll think of waterless stretches, post-holing over snowy passes, sketchy river crossings, and the like.

Micro's mom greeted us in their Seattle driveway saying, "Hippie's use back door! You aren't nearly as aromatic as younwere in White Pass... But still, dirty stinky hippie hikers use back door!" After Micro found our missing passports in her desk, her mom said, "Whew, we nearly got a divorce over those documents!" We ate curry chicken (super good), pilaf, and carrots for dinner, and passed out as soon as we could politely get ourselves to bed.


- Typoed on my iPhone

Mile 2375.8: more stove mishaps

I hiked as fast as I could to avoid night-hiking tonight. It worked! Yay.

At lunch, I had further disasters with the stove. I was really jumpy after last night, but that didn't prevent me from nearly knocking everything down even with my hand on the handle. I also had forgotten that I had my camp towel bunched up inside the fuel-efficiency spring-ring: it smoked, it burnt, and it didn't transfer any heat to my stove.

We ate lunch on a forest-service road, thinking, "yay, flat, sunny, nobody will come through here!" Wrong, so many trucks full of hunters rolled by. One guy pulled over to talk to us, he was super-cute, and his passenger was openly ogling us while we were openly ogling the driver. It made me think, "Maybe we don't bugle, but we're not that much classier than the horny elk we hear multiple times a day."

- Typoed on my iPhone

Mile 2323.3: I don't want to see your penis

I saw a lot of horses and bowhunters today, and despite them all, ran into a mama and baby elk. The most interesting thing to us, however, was running into a fellow through-hiker who had to get off the trail due to really bad knee problems, but has been hop-scotching sections since he recovered. He's a nice guy, likeable too, but that doesn't mean Team Mexico or Bust loves him. He was wearing all long-johns, with no nether support. It was obvious he likes his new-found skinny hiker body, he stood at our table (where we were sitting... crotch at eye level), gyrating his hips with every poit like an Italian uses his hands. It was like a bad accident, we didn't want to look, we knew we wouldn't like what we saw, but with all that swinging and dangling going on, it was hard not to.
- Typoed on my iPhone