Day 95: While I Was Out ...

(1429, Rock Creek to 1454, Mushroom Rock = 25 miles)

Gumby, Piper's Mom, and me! Thanks for everything!

Today was a pretty good day, considering.  Considering it was hot and hilly and this patch of forest looks a bit like a war zone, as does the trail.  Logged and full of brush and debris.  And the heat and volcanic dust has brought back the blisters.  Mine are minor.  Gumby's little toe is nearly avulsed.  It is admittedly gory.  But!  We are camped on a gorgeous ridge with a full(?) moon rising.  And we got our 25 miles in for the day.  A fairly normal day.  We'll take it! 

I've been a bit behind with writing, so I thought I'd catch up with some highlights.  Here goes!

Leaving Belden was awful.  13 miles uphill in the heat of the day.  Not the prettiest hike and full of poison oak.  And then there was a false top.  The real one was another three or four miles off.  Brutal.  A beautiful ridge-top camping spot was our reward.  And we missed the Belden fire (which closed the trail) by a few days.

Close encounters with the cow kind. Yikes!

Crossing California Hwy 36, just after the halfway point, we had spectacular trail magic from Piper's Mom!  I recognized her name from her responses in the PCT list-serve.  The magic was good when we arrived, but then Piper's Mom herself arrived to restock!  We were mutually thrilled to meet each other.  She'd been following my blog.  We three gladly had our photos taken together.  What a treat.  Thanks for taking care of us!

We pulled around 27 miles that same day and found ourselves at Drakesbad Ranch that evening.  Just in time for dinner.  We were joined by Siddhartha, Threshold, and Washout.  The Ranch is hiker-friendly on the sly and lets us eat dinner and breakfast after their regular guests and enjoy hot showers and a dip in their springs-heated pool.  In a meadows, under a nearly full moon, with steam rising off the water, it was heavenly.  We stayed in until our fingers pruned.

Sunset over Shasta.

Despite a late start the next day for the breakfast buffet, we managed 20 miles.  Enough to situate us for a stop at Old Station the following day to wait out the heat in order to tackle nearly 30 miles of heat and exposure along Hat Creek Rim.

Old Station was about as good as it gets for a convenience store.  The restaurant was closed, but the store owner was more than accommodating.  (He was from Wisconsin, of course!)  We spent 5 hours snacking and taking care of business from the previous days' unfortunate events.  Around 5 PM, we hit the Rim. 

THE pretty patch for the day!

We hiked the Hat Creek Rim until just after 1 AM.  It was long, and we were exhausted.  I faced three of my fears that night:  the dark, the bogeyman, and cows.  The cows and bogeyman made worse by the dark.  But the peace of the moon and silence of the night over a desert landscape prevailed.  That night, the earth took us in, and we slept like babies on the desert floor.  We both said later that it felt like the ground was hugging us that night.  Just the comfort we needed after all of our unfortunate events.

Slowly, everything has been returning to a kind of normal.  The past week seems a little surreal.  We are looking forward to wrapping up this section and moving on.  So far, we're on the right track.