Day 33

Mile 587.5 to mile 613.2

PCT Miles: 25.7 (41.1km)

Total Miles: 613.2 (981.1km)

Usually I’m highly productive in the morning regarding making some miles. I’ve done a fair amount of 10 before 10s and usually I hike for 6-7 hours (around 15 miles) before taking a break for lunch. Then in the afternoon I go with the flow, just hiking until I find a good place to camp (around 7pm).

Today was completely the opposite.

It was a tough morning. I was carrying 4 liters of water (and my backpack is still full of food). The first water source was in 16 miles. It felt to me that it took forever for these miles to pass.

But eventually they did. I’m back in the mountains so there’s a lot of elevation, which disguises a bit the effort to hike a mile. The full backpack seems to weight three times more when you’re hiking uphill.

When I arrived at the water source (a pipe coming out of nowhere), I took a longer break than usual. I had lunch, cameled up (drink a lot of water) and chatted a bit with Aragorn (danish, father of 3, quit his job and is doing the PCT) and Dust (german, attempted last year but gave up because of the high amount of snow. Came back this year to finish what he started). These weird names, by the way, are “trail names”. I’ll talk about trail names in a post soon.

Taking a longer break (also it took a long time to filter the not-so-clean water) recharged my batteries a bit. I was planning to do around 21 miles today, but I decided to keep hiking for 4 miles more. Hiking in the afternoon was much more pleasant (and flat) so in the end it turned out to be a good day 🙃.