Day 119 I didn’t sleep too well last night, but not because it was too cold. It wasn’t. One time I awoke and heard chewing sounds, so I immediately looked at my food bag to see if a rodent had chewed through my tent and then were having a go at that. Wasn’t the case. Then I realized that there was a two inches long bug crawling right above my head, well on the outside…
Day 118 It probably comes as no surprise to you that I had a bunch of chores to do given that I rolled into “town” yesterday. They took a while. It was, however, nice to have kind of a reset as opposed to just having pushed on for what would probably be ten days. I had slept quite badly as I had a lot of things to think about with the closure of the Northern…
Day 117 The ramifications of how this day ended has yet to become clear to me, but I hope they have before I have to write that section. But let’s start a bit more calmly at the beginning. I slept reasonably well, but woke up for no particular reason a couple of times. Started hiking around dawn and soon after that went by another volunteer trail crew gearing up to getting going, which I didn’t…
Day 116 Woke up because I was freezing and put on my down jacket, but I was too lazy to put on an extra pair of warm underwear so I never really got warm again or slept well. Thanks for nothing, sleep drunk version of me! Resultantly I was a bit slow to get going but I eventually got more awake and the warmth returned. The scenery of the first part of the day wasn’t…
Day 115 Got going earlier today just as dawn broke as I camped early yesterday. It was surprisingly cold, so it seemed like the heat wave had passed. Also mostly gone was the smoke and the soy eventually turned blue as the sun rose. Nice. My feet hurt a bit but that disappeared relatively quickly after getting them warmed up. It actually felt much easier going today. The lighter pack due to the dwindling food…
Day 114 I got up and going in a tad earlier than yesterday in equally warm, humid, and smoky weather. I wasn’t going to let that get to me as easily as it had yesterday, I was saying to myself. Briefly, it started raining, but stopped again before anything really came of it. Shortly after my wish for trail magic was granted, as someone had left some food and beverages for us. I had a…
Day 113 I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I will have a hard time finding many positive things to say about today. It didn’t rain. There was no poison oak. My old wound didn’t rupture again. I was not killed in a bizarre accident involving an elephant, two zebras and the word “unity”. That’s about it. Anyways, let’s get back to the beginning. After a nice nights sleep I got going at 7:30. The bridge…
Day 112 Despite taking a zero day in Cascade Locks, I was far from ready to leave when I awoke, so it was first a bit after ten that I checked out. Though I was somewhat apprehensive about it, I chose to finally ditch my old shoes, which meant a nice weight saving and could offset the extra gear I now were carrying. Then I went to the supermarket to get six days of food.…
Day 111 You probably already know most of the ingredients of a zero day. This one wasn’t much different. After breakfast and calling home, I unpacked the stuff I had ordered from Amazon and gotten yesterday. It was new socks, an emergency blanket, new trash compactor bags, which are especially thick plastic bags that I use for waterproofing, and some quite weirdly looking and large gloves that are supposed to be waterproof and breathable and…
Day 110 Horray! I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night with my sleeping bag soaked from camping in the middle of a cloud. I did in fact sleep quite well aside from waking up and having to pee and taking way to long to get up and out in the rain to do so. Well, let’s continue talking about sleep so the start of this diary entry comes out quite weirdly and…