Day 71

Mile 1116.3 to mile 1130.8

PCT Miles: 14.5 (23.2km)

Total Miles: 1130.8 (1809.3km)

The day started exactly the way we didn’t want: full of mosquitoes. For the first four hours of the day we hiked wearing our rain clothes plus the head net. Thankfully it was a bit cloudy so it was not that bad, warmth wise (definitely not that good either). Not being able to have proper breaks and the lack of prospect for any improvements on the mosquitoes situation really put both my and Maike’s mood down.

Mileage-wise, we had our best morning so far: by 10am we had covered half of what we had planned for today (7 out of 14 miles). We were still annoyed by the mosquitoes though.

All of a sudden, around 11am, we noticed that the amount of mosquitoes started to drop. At some point, Maike gave a leap of faith and removed all her mosquito protection. I did the same and for our positive surprise, the mosquitoes were almost gone indeed. The hike in the afternoon was much more pleasant, with high morale and low mosquitoes. And since we were ahead of schedule, we took longer mosquitoless breaks.

About 2 miles off to finish our day we had a quick break to drink water. Something caught my attention down in the valley and I saw something moving. Sure that it was a deer, I kept looking until I could see without a shade of doubt: I was looking at a black bear. “Oh my god it’s a bear” I said to Maike. She turned around and confirmed. Both me and Maike were seeing a bear in nature for the first time. “What do we do?”. “Let’s make noise and keep going”.

As soon as we started to clang our hiking poles together and Maike started singing, the bear (which we named Hera) ran away to the opposite direction. We kept hiking and singing steadily for the next 2 miles until we reached our campground for tonight. We were hoping to meet more people but the campground (that has space for about 5-6 tents) was empty. We started to pitch our tents and do our chores.

No more than half an hour later, we were both relieved to see that two other hikers arrived to camp here. When Maike was taking to one of them, he asked “is that Bruno?”. It was Pete, one of the hikers that arrived was part of the first group of people that I hiked together with on my very first day! That’s so cool!

Later more and more people started to show up and we ended up having a nice and cozy tiny neighborhood for tonight.