Day 82

Mile 1154.5 to mile 1174.7

PCT Miles: 20.2 (32.3km)

Total Miles: 1174.7 (1879.5km)

We woke up and enjoyed our last breakfast together for at least two months 🥺💜. We started driving a bit before 8am and at 10:30 I was saying goodbye to Maike and taking my first steps on the PCT since more than a week. It felt a bit bittersweet… I had an amazing time with Maike, both on trail and on my time off and to be very very honest I feel a bit demotivated with the PCT (and I blame the mosquitoes). But I have a plan to cheer me up.

I want to finish the PCT as soon as I can. Starting tomorrow, I’ll try to push a marathon per day. More than that, I will do longer stretches on trail before resupplying and I plan to take less zeroes. For this first stretch coming back to the PCT, I want to do 220 miles in 8.5 days. I started today (20 miles down!) and I want (need) to arrive by Monday before the post office closes (4pm) to grab my resupply box 📦. Then, I want to go back to trail on the same day and start a new 9 days stretch. Let’s see how this goes!

The first three or four hours hiking were very busy. It’s Sunday and there were a lot of day hikers and climbers (!) on or around the trail. But slowly it started to become less common to see people and after 3pm I didn’t see anybody for the rest of the day.

Although it was warm, I enjoyed the hiking day. Unfortunately the mosquitoes did show up but they gave a break around dinner time, so it wasn’t so bad.

I must say that I’m becoming a bit scared of the wildfires. Yesterday on our drive to South Lake Tahoe we saw from the car a fire on the mountains and just now, after setting up my tent and starting cooking dinner, I saw that there’s a fire south from where I’m camping. By the amount of smoke it seemed that it had just started but now (8:30pm) it’s worse. The wind is blowing to the other side so I really believe there’s no risk for me. In any case I didn’t put the rain fly on so I can be a bit vigilant during the night.