Miles: 12
Trip Miles : 54/2690
I slept pretty meh last night on account of my legs feeling like they were on fire from previous days worth of mosquito bites. This happened to me on the John Muir Trail last summer and I wonder if everyone is averse to getting lit up by bites as I am. Probably. I take hope in the skin on fire sensation lasted only one night last year, so I hope I’ve endured the worse of it.
The morning hiking is beautiful as Mousetrap and I come across a meadow that is apparently used as an airstrip. There’s no sign that any plane has ever landed here, although we do see a forest service cabin that apparently watches over this landing strip. We peer into the cabin and although rustic, it does show signs of recent activity. The isolated cabin makes me think of reading Desolation Angels a few years back, by Jack Kerouac.
Mousetrap and I pass time taking as we hike about why people quit the trail. We start by breaking it down into two categories: leaving because of circumstances out of your control and then the voluntary choice to quit the trail. If you get injured or have a family member pass, that’s obviously out of our your control. The second category is what most interests me. People spend lots of money and restructure their whole lives to be out of here. So what drives them away from the trail? I think back to two aspiring PCT hikers I drove last summer. I picked them up on Sonora Pass and they had logged a tick above 1,000 miles by that point. But when I picked them up, they told me they were getting off trail and had just booked their plane tickets back back to France and the East Coast respectively. When I asked why they were getting off trail, the hiker from France surprised me with his answer. “Boredom. I’ve been hiking for two and half months consecutively and it just feels like the same thing day in and day out. You walk, walk, and walk.” I certainly have no judgements on this. I also consider that they were very limited in town stops with the pandemic hitting hard in summer of 2020, which probably added to the monotony he was describing. I think using town stops to recover and socialize will be a critical piece of the puzzle in making it to Mexico.
In the early afternoon, Mousetrap and I encounter a truly awful burn section with an insane amount of downed trees. There are literally hundreds of down trees smack in the middle of the trail and we spend two hours traveling half of a mile. But, once we get out of the burn, it’s pretty cruisey trail and on multiple occasions we walk 10 consecutive minutes without having to climb or crawl.
Mousetrap and I are trying to get far enough today in order to be able to get back to the town of Mazama by tomorrow afternoon. I find a really nice camp spot a few hundred yards off trail at 4:30 p.m., although it’s a mile short or so of where we said we would try to end up tonight. I feel the spot is too good to pass up and decided to call it a day here. I leave Mousetrap a note on trail saying “Northstar” with an arrow pointed toward the site. Mousetrap finds me no problem, I beat him for the first time in chess tonight, and he grabs the water for both of us.
