The Walking Dom

Mile 2569.4 / KM 4135.7
Pass Creek Tentsite to Stehekin

I miss: Flammkuchen.

Podcast of my day: "All things Comedy" with Al Madrigal and Bill Burr. Funny stuff.

Pigeon, downward facing dog, child's pose, normal human sitting pose; tried them all. Any pose I sit or lie in hurts after a short while. All my muscles are aching, especially my legs and my butt. Speaking of which; Washington has really kicked our asses one more time in the past week. Hell, we climbed Everest in the past 5 days! 26,623 feet in elevation! That's 8,874 meters for all you normal metric thinking people out there. It's one thing to climb that much, but the thing that gets me the most are the ferns! Yes, those prehistoric things that grow in the lower valley areas, collect thousands of raindrops on their leaves and whenever you brush by them those rain drops will transfer over to you and soak whatever you're wearing even if it's not raining. Can't stand them! But other than the ferns, the fallen logs and the rain there isn't much to complain about. The North Cascades are absolutely beautiful. Fall has the mountains in full embrace with its bright red and yellow colours and I am happy to be a spectator to the season changing. The marmot's coats are changing from brown to white and it's easy to spot them in the colourful grass. They whistle loudly whenever we come too close to them to warn all of their 200 siblings of the returning heavy breathing giants.

This section felt like it was the most remote section on the entire PCT. We walked into Stehekin after 5.5 days of seeing nothing but nature. It was awesome. Tough but awesome. It was muddy, slippery and steep as f@$€ at times. Katie fell down a muddy slope, lost all of her tent stakes somewhere (using twigs now instead), I almost broke my ankle and lost my eating dish so I'll be eating out of zip lock bags for the rest of the trail. I can handle cold soaked couscous out of a bag for 4 days and that's exactly how long it will take until we hit the border to Canada. Pretty insane to think that we walked here all the way from Mexico. THAT'S SO FAR!!! Day hikers sometimes ask where you started when they pass by and the answer seems so ridiculous these days; Mexico.

So any who. We're in Stehekin now. 80 miles from the border. Seen the movie Clear History? That's how this town looks and feels like. A remote pretty holiday town by the water, only accessible by ferry or float plane. They've got a killer bakery and a restaurant, a laundry machine that made everything equally dirty but nothing clean, the worst shower on the entire trail and no cellphone reception or WIFI anywhere. Last one I didn't mind at all. Haven't had any contact with the outside world for over a week now and we won't get a signal until after crossing the border which will make this the longest period of time that I haven't had reception since I was 12 years old.

We're a bubble of about 15 hikers who will most likely leap frog all the way to the end together. It's a good gang to be finishing with. The weather's been good for the past 2 days but the forecast calls for snow on our final day. Of course it does!