9/27/2023
Section: Milepost 2170 to 2193.1
Total Trail Miles: 2191 Mils
Distance: 24.2 Miles
Moving Time: 09:38 Hrs
Elevation Gain: 5469 ft
We woke to the steady pitter-patter of rain which is both comforting and unsettling at the same time. No massive puddles formed in the bottom of the tent this time and we rejoiced in having a very good, very light and very nice tent over our heads once again. No offense Josh and Maddy - loved the Kelty, but those skylights… We delayed our departure to see if we could get a clean window to pack everything up. We pseudo-got one and took it.
Everything is soaked. There’s only so much modern gear can do when the humidity is approaching 90% and the rain just won’t stop. The brand new Gore tex Altras kept my feet dry which is a miracle - there isn’t much I hate more than putting my feet in wet, cold socks to start the day. Amanda’s Topo’s have a small amount of mesh at the top so, despite also being Gore tex, she wasn’t so lucky.
We got our soaked things put away. Another thing I hate - rolling up a dripping tent so it can sit soaked in the bottom of my backpack all day. I carefully packed my sleeping bag into the new dry-bag I got for my sleeping bag. Good ‘ol Sea to Summit! Amanda goes with the trash bag method now which works well. As always - showing off her fiscal aptitude. Once everything was put away and all our damp stuff was back on us, the only thing left to do was warm it back up.
The stage today picks up from the depression we stopped in last night in the North Fork Snag Creek drainage and immediately starts climbing up the drainage, breaking off into a tributary drainage about ¾’s of a mile in. About a mile on the stage passes into the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest, a forest I spent quite a bit of time growing-up. The trail climbs for about 3 miles until it gains an east-west ridge running between Mowich Butte and Sedum Point. At Sedum Point the trail turns back north and crosses Lookout Mountain Road, after which it descends 2000 feet to a low, old caldera basin with Bunker Hill sticking out of the middle. At 11.5 miles in, the trail crosses over Szydlo Road and then Wind River Road in quick succession and pushes on through the Warren Gap. From this point, the stage ends the day with a 2600 foot, eight mile climb past Gobblers Knob to a high promontory on the west shoulder of Big Huckleberry Mountain.
Once we were up and running it was pretty much an all day slog through the rain with limited views. Not a whole lot to say beyond that. There was no one on the trail today. Shouldn’t be surprised there - some of the PCTrs will actually just not hike on days like these to avoid getting soaked but we are also at the end of the pack so that might have more to it. At one point, Amanda found a late season huckleberry and immediately spit it out. Way overripe. We are back into that strange Cascade landscape that is predominantly volcanic. Lots of low flat spaces which I think were likely calderas at one point with big, rounded ridgelines. Even here it is pretty different to northern Washington where you have more Sierra-ish like sharp ridges. It rained all day… I mean, all day - never really stopped. It was devastating. The backpack covers, for some reason, did not get the same level of waterproofing as our jackets because our backpacks are soaked through. Water is running out of the bottoms of each… thank god everything inside is waterproof.
Eventually, the sun set as we made our final assault up to the shoulder of Big Huckleberry Mountain. I had planned to get to a campground that I had picked out down the trail another couple of miles but we were both miserable and Amanda said she didn’t care that we didn’t have water, we were stopping. Bit of an irony there, given that we were surrounded by water. We crash-landed in a clear spot next to the trail under some small trees and hastily packed up our things. We took alternating bites off of a block of cheese for dinner before I sprinted out into the dark to jettison the food bags in the lower branches of a nearby tree. We relished the warmth of our sleeping bags which, through persistent diligence, we had kept wonderfully dry and passed out listening to the buckets of rain fall all around us hoping that it would let up some the next day.
