Day 81

PCT Miles: 0

Total Miles: 1154.5 (1847.2km)

“It could be worse!” — that was today’s motto.

I can count on one hand the days that I put an alarm to wake up during the PCT. Today, unfortunately, was one of them. Our plan was to pick up a car that we rented from someone using an app at 7am, so we woke up at 5:30 to finish packing. From there we would drive to Truckee and arrive before 2pm to post my resupply package before I restarted from the trailhead me and Maike ended at two weeks ago. From there Maike would return her rented bear canister in South Lake Tahoe and return to San Jose in the afternoon.

This was the actual course of events:

We woke up, finished packing and said goodbye to our hosts. We took an Uber to pick-up the car (carrying all our stuff) and were there at 7am sharp. We waited for one hour and nobody showed up, so we canceled the car. Jessica picked us up and we went to a rental car company (in the meanwhile I reserved one car online to speed up the process). The guy behind the counter said that he was cancelling all the reservations for today because they had no cars available 🤷🏻‍♂️ . It was already 11am and we were still in San Jose (and it was getting warmer).

We tried the app one more time. The only car available was a Fiat 500 with a pick-up time at 4pm. We booked and called the owner to ask if we could do an early pick up. He said we could pick the car up in one hour, so we went to the Post Office in San Jose to send my resupply box (that I will hopefully receive in 9 days) and from there to pick-up the 500. Everything went smoothly and we finally had a car! Time to drive east and think about the plan B, since it was too late to restart the PCT today still.

New plan: we drive to South Lake Tahoe, deliver the bear canister somehow (the place where we rented closed at 4, we would arrive around 7), sleep somewhere in SLT (because Truckee is too expensive and it would be too much to drive today) and tomorrow early morning we drive ~1h30min to the trailhead.

On our way to SLT we saw smoke from a fire in a forest close by. I counted at least 5 airplanes/helicopters carrying buckets of water to control the fire. I’m not necessarily excited to be hiking into the wildfire season now. Today was the fourth day in a row with temperatures over 35°C. Our 500 was also struggling to keep the air inside cool while going up more than 7000ft in elevation gain.

Since we couldn’t actually return the bear canister, we hid it close to the ranger station (where we rented it) and tomorrow we’ll give them a call to check if they found it. From there we had a quick drive to our hotel (that we booked on our way here) and tomorrow we’re trying to leave to the trailhead at 7 and restart the bike at 9 or 10 latest. And then, 8-9 days of hiking with one focus: crush miles! (and escape the wildfires)