Jack (Silver Fox) Turley's PCT hikes: Day 22 May 28, 2017

Daily miles 21 plus 1 extra
Total miles 400
Hours hiked from 5:00 am to 5:30 pm

I have now hiked 400 miles!

Camping surrounded by a couple of dozen through hikers and what seemed to be about 10,000 Boy Scouts did present challenges when it came to sleep. But what the heck. It was fun. I got up a bit earlier than normal this morning because I knew I has the dreaded Highway 2 road walk to do and I wanted to get at it before a lot of traffic got on it.

I got going right at first light and dropped down to my first of many crossings of Highway 2 today. The first hill of the day waited for me on the other side. It was a somewhat steep but otherwise mundane climb until I pushed off with my hiking pole as I do thousands of times a day, but something felt different. I looked down and my pole was right up against a rattle snake! We both seemed rather shocked by this, but I was the only one who jumped several feet and let out a small squeal. Several hikers behind me reported seeing a rattler at around this point and they all commented that it seemed unusually agitated!

Early morning views (after the snake encounter)

Then it was a long drop down to the second crossing of the highway. A short mile later, I was at the third crossing, this one being the start of a three mile road walk. Road walks suck in general and this one in particular because this highway is very twisty and attracts fast cars and motorcycles whilst providing little in the way of a shoulder. But I survived. The detour had been put in place to protect the habitat of some species of frog. The detour itself was one mile longer than the section of trail it went around, hence the extra mile in today's total.

Hwy 2 road walk

Along the way, the highway passed an old, likely abandoned ski area with something that I have never seen before. A single chair lift. Not as in a solitary chairlift by itself, but a chairlift designed to take one skier up at a time. I did not take a picture, but I found the pic below later on the net.

A side trail from a camp ground reconnected me to the PCT. This is where the second climb of the day commenced. Even though it had warmed considerably, the climb went well. And it took me to yet another crossing of the highway. At this crossing, there were three gentlemen out supporting runners who were training for an upcoming ultra marathon. Got chatting to them, and it turns out that all three had previously run 2:20 marathons. That is pretty close to world class speed in the marathon. And they were all very humble and nonchalant about their accomplishments. They seemed more in awe of our hiking to Canada.

Further down the hill, we came to Camp Glenwood. Now, backing up a bit, all of us had been silently disappointed that all of these highway crossings which were all at day use areas had produced not even one offer of food or drink. Well, Camp Glenwood took care of that and more. About 15 of us converged on the camp at around the same time. We were greeted by the offer of a cold beer and a burger was thrown on the the BBQ for each of us. Did I mention the fresh fruit? And they provided a postcard of the camp for each of us to fill out and they will mail them out this week. People are do great to us grubby, stinky PCT hikers.

Then it was down the trail for one last crossing of the highway. The last mile or so to where I am now camped introduced us to the dreaded Poodle Dog Bush. PDB sounds like a nice plant, but apparently it is akin to poison oak on steroids. The trail maintenance crews have done a great job of keeping it trimmed back from the trail.