Thursday, July 28, 2021
Mile 1717 to Mile 1740
Early in the morning, I packed up and left my Callahan luxury suite. I quietly exited from the side door because the front door was locked until 7am.
I walked back on the paved road to the abandoned dirt road entry which had a sign saying, “Private Property, Do Not Enter”. I stopped for a second wondering if I’m not supposed to take it to the PCT, but I did come down on that abandoned road, so I went back up. It met up with the railroad crossing again, up a steep, but short trail then the little bit of steep dirt road, and I was back on the trail. In a short while, it was time for breakfast. I was so happy that I’d bought these at the Safeway and had carried them out today.
Sometime in the day, I met a thru hiker named Wawa. I also met a hiker named Lobo who had thru-hiked in 2015. That year, he made it to Dunsmuir before heading home. So this year, he started from Dunsmuir and is heading to Canada. The three of us were on a stretch that didn’t have water for a long while, and it was hot.
At a certain mile, there was supposed to be water at a cow pond, so I dropped my pack, picked up my bottles, and walked in the direction of the pond. The tank toward the left that seasonally has water was empty. When I got to the pond, it was so thick with algae that my bottle filled with more algae than water. I filtered the algae water into a second bottle through a bandana, and even the bandana kept getting clogged. I kept having to use different parts of the bandana until the entire thing was covered in slime and goop, and I had no more bandana to filter with. I ended up with about half of a bottle of murky water, so I collected another bottleful of algae and filtered that into the same second bottle. Then the murky water got filtered with the Sawyer Squeeze, which still clogged the Sawyer Squeeze, but at least I had almost a liter of water.
A while later, I ran into Lobo again who was now walking unsteadily. I told him that I had gotten water at the algae pond, and he said he had missed it. After he left, I was worried that he looked extremely dehydrated, so I tried to catch up to him. He was sitting leaned into a tree, and I quickly asked if he needed any water. He pointed ahead and I saw that we were next to a water cache or gallon bottles! What a relief. I took only what I needed until the next source and moved on.
At the end of the day, I reached a large flat tent site in the forest and near an abandoned road. There was plenty of room here for lots of tents. After setting up my camp, Australaan hiker, Shit Kicker, came by and decided to stop here, too. He said that he had been up late the night before and needed to stop early. I was hoping to see Lobo to make sure he was okay, but I didn’t see him at the end of the evening. It’s nice to have company at camp at the end of the day, even if its just to sleep.
Trail Meandering 