300 Mile Hike Day 2

Friday, July 14 2017

Long distance hiking isn't like camping in a campground.  In a campground, campsites are considered to belong to the occupant. On long distance trails in the back-country,  campsites become community gathering places. We woke up to find we were sharing the campsite with a 60 year old guy from Southern California and a 24 year old girl from Finland. We ended up spending a lot of the day with them since we seemed to have similar hiking paces and tended to stop every couple hours at the same places to take a break.  Finland girl had already been all over the world.  She taught English at a girl's school in India, climbed Mt Fuji in Japan, been to Nepal.. among many other interesting trips. 

The 60 year old guy was hiking in sandals so that led to conversation as well.  Hiking in sandals is like yoga in that it enhances the mind body link.  They had been on the trail for several weeks already so their endurance was greater than ours. They had planned a 20 mile day.  We had planned a 16.5 mile day.  So they are ahead of us now.  I predict we will catch them next week though because they plan to go into the town of Etna for a day and we don't. 

We had some pretty amazing views of Mt Shasta and the surrounding area as we went through the day.  See photos. 

Paul was not in the groove.  He was hurting.  In the first thirty hours we were on the trail, we climbed 5000' and walked 22.5 miles.  So it wasn't an easy start. In fact, it was the hardest start ever for us hiking.  Usually I try to set our trips up so we ease in to it, keeping the first few days under 2000' of climbing. That wasn't gonna work on this trip unless we hiked 2 miles and camped each day. Ha!Ha!

If you're wondering who Paul is,  Paul is the father of one of CJ's Boy scout friends. He and I have discovered we have a mutual enjoyment of backpacking so we've become hiking partners.  His son got a job this summer so he didn't come on the hike but Paul still did. At the end of this hike,  Paul and I will have laid down about 1000 miles hiking together. I predict we'll keep hiking together after our kids all have gone off on their own.  Paul REALLY enjoys interacting with all the people from all over the world who come to the west coast to hike the Pacific Crest.  He's a traveler so he likes getting information he can use to put together his next big international vacation with his family.

We ended our day at a spring. Springs are awesome places to me when I'm backpacking.  Water was gushing out of a pipe in the side of a hill.  I'll try to add a photo with CJ standing beside it but I'm doing this from my phone so it looks like it might be sideways. The water coming out of that pipe was so cold it may as well have been ice cubes churning out. We cleaned up in the creek the spring created but standing barefoot in the water was impossible because it literally hurt because it was so cold. On the good side,  the cold water was amazing to drink after a hot day walking. Like pulling water out of a refrigerator in the woods.  There's a reason companies sell "spring water" and make huge profit doing it. 

Since we were so close to the spring,  there were a lot bugs around so CJ set up tents and didn't sleep under the stars. 

Total up: 3149'
Total down: -2165
Total miles: 16.4

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