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thehikingnerd · 5 years

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Day 94.

I woke up early and had took off without eating breakfast, mainly because I only had a Snickers bar to my name and figured I should hold off for a bit. I got back to the trail and tried to find Dixie and Perk. I assumed they had gone further than me since they never seem to mind some hiking into the evening, whereas I prefer to be set up and having dinner as it gets dark. So I turned right onto the trail, and in coming out of the tree cover where I had slept, could see that it was a pretty sunrise. I walked on for a couple of miles and saw a path that forked off to the right from the PCT and saw on the app that there was a water source down that trail but was far enough that I didn’t want to walk to see if that was where Dixie and Perk had gone. At the fork I could see a lot of Altra foot prints in the dust. Usually you could get a good idea of who was a head of you if you looked at the shoe prints in the dust of the trail. It could have been other hikers, but it was likely and looked as though they had either stopped there, paced and turned around a bit while discussing their options at that fork, and finally decided to go to the water source that was a little far… or had camped there and already packed up leaving all those foot prints and headed down trail. I really wasn’t sure, which was more likely since they probably camped later than me and I guessed would have slept in a little later as well. After some deliberation, mainly concerning that I had about 15 miles in total to hike before getting to the road where I could get more food than the Snickers bar I had just eaten while deciding what to do, I went on. It was possible they were ahead of me on trail and if so, they would surely want to hang out a bit at the halfway point and Dixie would at the very least have to spend some time on a video at that important of a spot. So, I pushed on, passed the turn off for Butt Mountain, and still early, probably around 11 am, I saw the squared-off, stone post come into view. Dixie and Perk were not there, so I was pretty sure they were behind me still. So here I was, all alone in the quiet morning and I had made it half way on the PCT. It’s an odd moment and feeling. On one hand, you are proud and impressed and happy that you were both lucky enough and dedicated enough to have made it this far. On the other you know exactly what it took to get to this point and how incredibly difficult it was, only to immediately be slapped in the face with the reality that you will essentially have to do that all over one more time in order to make it to Canada. You know that if you made it this far you also were capable of completing the whole trail and that your ultimate goal is in fact reachable and realistic, not some fantasy, you were now over half way there. Closer, not farther away. For the first time since you started over 3 months ago, there was officially less trail ahead of you than behind you. It played in well with my notion of the trail in its entirety being symbolic of or at least being organized similarly as a lifetime, in and of itself, and in that light, this was indeed the mid-life/mid-trail crisis point. A real, fundamental shift in perspective. I took a lot of pictures and sat there in quiet solitude reflecting on the meaning of this journey, how far I had come, and how far I still had to go. After having waited for a while I realized that it might in fact be quite a while before Dixie and Perk would come through, and I was already quite hungry. So… I shouldered my pack a started down the trail. I had become accustomed to trail jogging or going at such a brisk walk that most would have to jog to keep up with me, but today, I was hungrier than normal and literally had nothing left. I was flying down the trail at break neck speed. I was even reminded of Achilles and J-man and how they blew past me a few days prior. I hit a flat valley area at the foot of my descent down a hill and was met with the longest wet stretch I had seen on trail. There were days you hiked in the Sierras where the trail was a small stream, and there was a long stretch near Evolution Creek that was perhaps similar, but still, it must have been a half a mile to 1 mile of mid-calf water. It slowed me down and I knew there was no way around or to save my feet from getting soaked, so I just walked right through and it was at the least a little refreshing while going through. FINALLY, I made it to the road, now starving. I sat my pack down and starting thumbing it. Cars passed by, no big deal, that happened a lot and it was pretty common to have to wait a while before a kind soul would pull over and help you out. 20 minutes passed and not one person stopped… wasn’t much I could do but persist, so that’s what I did. I had enough time that I noticed that there were tons, I mean tons, of dead butterflies and dragon flies on the side of the road. I never really thought about it to be honest, but yeah, there were little butterfly corpses all over the place and I could that roads could be pretty devastating to these vulnerable types of insects. At this point 45 minutes had passed and I was becoming angry, or hangry I suppose. I was starving, and had been talking to butt’rs via text and he had told me that there was an all you can eat buffet that ended fairly soon and that if I wanted to get in on it I needed to hurry. And I know I was pissing and moaning on the groupchat or whatever, but that F@#%er even sent me a pic of the pizza he was eating! Dude, I was losing it. I wanted to pick up a handful of gravel and throw it at the cars and that way they would at least stop, might even have to take me into town in order to get my information for repairs to their car bodies, lol, I was that hungry and upset that no one would simply stop and give me a ride. I swore to myself that I would stop and offer a ride whenever I could to a hitch hiker going forward. I could see how desperate and vulnerable I was out here, and I didn’t want to let another person potentially suffer just because people don’t want to stop. I don’t know… at 75 minutes and having lost all faith in humanity, and being about as hungry as I could remember ever being, to the point that I was feeling weak and a little out of my mind, FINALLY, FINNNNALLY, a nice lady in a Subaru stopped and took me into town. I thanked her profusely for the ride and told her I had been there for pushing an hour and a half trying to get a ride. She dropped me off in town, delivering me directly to the pizza place. Still not entirely in my right mind, and a little pissed at Butt’rs for sending that pick, I sat my pack outside and went in and joined Butt’rs at a table and destroyed pizza until I couldn’t stuff another bite in. I had barely made it for the all you can eat lunch special, and I’ve never been more relieved in my life to have made it and finally eaten. After that, we walked over to the church or youth center there in Chester that allowed PCT thru-hikers to camp in their back-yard area for free. That’s were Butt’rs had already set up and where I followed suit. He said the others had gotten a room, but that it was expensive due to some festival happening that everything was just about booked up. I think they had all gotten to town the night before. We walked across the street to a bar/restaurant where I got to see the rest of the crowd and caught up a bit. They gave me the lay of the land. It had taken me so long to hitch, and yet of course, only a few minutes for Dixie and Perk, so that despite me haven gotten to the road hours before them, it wasn’t long before they too had made it into town and we found everyone in the dubbed Sierra Club together for the first time since Donner Ski Ranch, where Rooster had left the trail and I had to go get my cyst taken care of. It was a good feeling, but seemed like we were all still out of sync. We needed a day to rest and recuperate, and all get back on the same page, but wasn’t sure how that would go with them all already being on their zero day and us having just got to town. Didn’t know if they would want to head back to the trail the same day as the three of us who’d just gotten in. I showered in a coin shower at the laundromat after having done my laundry. It was good to be clean, and rested, and well-fed, and to have a real grocery store to resupply at. That evening we had some beers on the back porch of that building where we were all camped with other PCTers and all tried to share the limited outlets there to recharge our batteries for the next leg of the trail.

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