8/18/20 PCT Update #2: Stehekin —> Stevens Pass

Dear family and friends,


We’ve made it through another leg of the trail and are writing with a quick update to share what we have been experiencing. 

Stehekin was a beautiful summer paradise, but the shower at the Purple Point campground was broken, so we decided that it was time to head back to the trail only a few hours after having gotten there. A shuttle operated by a resort there is on a limited schedule and there are no roads that go into town, but in the early evening we were able to flag down a small truck willing to give us a ride back to the bakery. A teenager named Quinn had just loaded up the truck from a big rig that had been ferried into town on the lake, and we sat on the back as he sped away from the lake leaning against the ice cream, eggs, and frozen pork bakery delivery.  From there we caught a ride the rest of the way back to the trail head with a guy who claimed to know everyone in town because he does everyone’s internet.

The beautiful weather has continued to hold, and we made our way through the Glacier Peak Wilderness with stunning views of snow capped peaks for over fifty miles. We caught our first glimpse of Mount Rainier on a ridge walk starting from Red Pass, and have had to keep looking over our shoulders to catch the northbound view of Glacier Peak. 

This stretch of Washington has also been challenging — lots of elevation gain and loss each day (Washington’s John Muir Trail?), blow downs, broken bridges, unseasonably warm weather, and muddy and overgrown trail. One fun surprise: I was stung by some kind of wasp or bee on my lip and even with a Benadryl I had a huge swollen lip for about ten hours! 

The trail crosses a major four lane highway at Stevens Pass, and when we got in yesterday evening we were so incredibly lucky to be met by a friend of a friend staying in Leavenworth for the month. It felt like real trail magic to get a ride as soon as we got to the busy highway, and then we were greeted with a bowl of blueberries and some cold beer and seltzer!! We enjoyed our berries and beer as we sat in the back of her truck down to the railroad town of Skykomish, where my brother had called ahead to get us a room at the friendly local inn here. A freight train comes through here every few hours, including 2:30 in the morning!

There are handfuls of hikers here and there and we try to talk trail with them and learn from them. There are lots of long section hikers who love the PCT up here and we trade stories about the PCT sections we have hiked down in California. We are trying to figure out how to recalibrate a little by reducing our pack weight — our legs are getting stronger each day, but we know we could move with more speed and alacrity if we pare down or parted with  some of our things. We’ll be heading out tomorrow morning to continue on to snoqualmie Pass! 

Love,
Rebecca & Johnathan 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

8/27/20 PCT Update #4: Snoqualmie —> White Pass

Dear friends and family, We felt more at home on this section of the PCT through southern Washington, because parts of it reminded us of northern California. We have gradually hiked out of the rugged North Cascades and the profile of the hills have become softer and more rounded. The trail curved west to take us through Mt Rainier National Park, and to get there we skirted the watershed that contains Seattle’s drinking water and crossed over many dirt roads.  It had been probably a hundred trail miles since we had first seen Mt Rainier at Red Pass close to Glacier Peak, and we next saw it again unexpectedly, hiking around a corner through a clear cut strip with power lines overhead. It doesn’t look like anything else in this landscape and it seems to have its own weather system. As we got even closer over the next few days the sky was cloudless except for over the mountain. We got our first “trail magic” — a couple drove their truck up one of the dirt roads and set up a sandwich ba...
Read more

9/3/20 PCT Update # 5: White Pass —> Cascade Locks (We made it to Oregon!)

Dear friends and family,   Most of the last 150 miles out of Washington were really beautiful. And actually, it would be hard to overstate how stunning the Washington section of the PCT is in in August and early September. We continue to feel so lucky just to be able to be out here hiking.  We stayed one extra night back in Packwood close to White Pass, a night longer than our new trail friends. I had been starting to feel a small pinch in my right knee — nothing serious — but it seemed like it would be safer to rest. It went away after the second night, and then we were able to hike several high 20 mile days back to back, with similar effort that we had been putting in to lower mileage days a couple of weeks ago.  During the first 20 miles out from White Pass we made it to Goat Rocks, a place that north bound hikers had been raving about for the past few hundred miles of passing them. SoCal will always be my favorite part of the PCT, but there are points in that wilderne...
Read more