Pacific Crest Trail

Poodles and poison

Day 27

Slept well and got up before dawn to hike. Just before leaving camp I checked to see if I forgot something. I hadn’t but instead noticed anbig frog slowly waddling across it. When the sun poked up over the horizon it highlighted surprising number of nice views as the trail took us near the crest line most of the day. The trail was pretty flat and nicely maintained, so things were easy going. Unfortunately our old fiend the poodle dog bush made a number of appearances today, but the aforementioned views more than made up for it. Around mid day I felt tired and that it would be tough to pull off the 29 miles I had planned for the day, so I queued three albums on my smartphone and promised myself not to look at how I was doing on the GPS based map. That gave me some new energy and worked surprisingly well and I only had a few more miles to go. That’s when things took a turn for the worse as I entered an area with another unfriendly greenish thingy, the evil sidekick of the poodles: Poison Oak. They also give a very bad rash and were strewn all over the last part of the trail. At first I was unsure if I could recognize it even though I had seen pictures online so moving got very very slow as I more or less tried to avoid everything and because I was expecting the poison oak but didn’t see it. Then some time later I got to the area that actually had the plants and the going got even slower. I was wearing shorts and also didn’t want to get any else in contact with the poison oak as the oils subsequently could rub off of me. This was very exhausting mentally but I finally made it through this last ordeal of the day and got to camp near a ranger station. Took me quite some time to set up camp and I got quite cold (as we were basically within a cloud) with very little energy left, but got into my sleeping bag and warmed up again. Hope to god that I ain’t getting any rahshes from the poison oak the next couple of days. Next to the camp site were a bunch of poodle dog bush smellable from within my tent and some high voltage lines which you could hear the loud crackles from. Best case scenario: the poodles don’t infuse my dreams but the power lines leave me energized for tomorrow. I still have my bad sense of humor 🙂

Frog
Frog
Poison oak
Poison oak

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