This morning I checked out of my room, but still needed to upload this journal which seems to take forever. The wordpress setup I have on my site does not work very well with my half-baked Kindle / keyboard setup. So I end up spending hours squinting at some tiny text box where I insert my posts and pictures.

I skulked around the Packwood Inn jumping from picnic table to table leaching on their WIFI while trying to find some shade.
Finished up around 1 and had some pizza from next door. Ordered a large 3 topping. Ate that whole thing. Then headed to the grocery store next that place. That’s Packwood. IGA, Packwood Inn, Pizza place, Saloon across the street, gas station.
I need to get from Packwood back up to Kracker Barrel general store next to the trail. About a 20 minute ride on the highway.

Until today, I’ve been lucky getting rides. Not so today. I dropped my pack in front of IGA on the highway through town and started thumbing. Dozens and dozens of cars and trucks go by. Some wave at me. Why do they wave? Give me a ride asshole !

I’m joined by another hiker named Scavenger. We smile and wave in the hot sun. He’s 31 from NYC and moved to Arizona recently. Did the AT a few years ago. He’s also into bikepacking. When not backpacking he does web customization work on wordpress sites. He is a nice guy, but a little odd. He’s getting frustrated with the hitching situation and starts chatting up people unloading their shopping carts from IGA. “Hey you heading toward White Pass when your done?” Fail.

Eventually some gal pulls up in a little car and asks where we are going. She is in the area to do a few days of backpacking and didn’t think she was going that far. Drives away….then comes back and picks us up ! It took over an hour to get a hitch. Hopefully anyone reading this will think twice when they see a smelly hiker on the road. Give them a ride !

So I make it up to the General Store and reunite with Stormtrooper ! Bunch of other hikers milling around eating and drinking. The store owner ropes Scavenger and me into a little project to put together some shelves. While we are working on that Scavenger is flirting with the checker.

Storm and I decide to camp out back of the store and hit the trail tomorrow. We meet a couple of retired Marine officers and have some long chats about Afghanistan (Attrition and Prichard). Attrition’s specialty was IED discovery and disposal. He telling us all sorts of stories you don’t hear in the news. LIke the ding-dong Afghani army guys he is training. He tells me they Afghani’s get $30 for each IED they find and disarm. Well each time they bring these guys to a training range, they find out someone has planted a bunch of new IED’s around that need to be disarmed. When these guys turn in the evidence and it is scanned for biometric data, it is traced to the same students.

Some of his stories are pretty dark. Like men taking boys as their sex toys who fill that role until released. Some of these boys are trained from an early age to carry explosive vests. How the graft and corruption is so pervasive that soldiers go without pay because others above them have skimmed so much of the money the US and our allies pay to the government to fund their army. God what a mess.

While we are chatting, Scavenger comes over and sets up his tent. The store is about to close. He talks to us for a minute then disappears. We never see him come back…..he got hooked up with the cashier. Must have stayed the night at her place, heh.
Good to be hanging with Stormy again. He is full of trail stories. Love that guy.

Here is a picture of the store when we were leaving in the morning. Those picnic tables were full of hikers the day before and probably every day thereafter during the season.

 

Been hanging out here in Packwood. Eating. Writing my journal. Eating. I’ve somehow managed to lose my zip-on leggings for my hiking shorts. I had put them on a couple days ago when the mosquitoes were bad and forgot to repack them when I took them off near Goat Rocks.

Saw Work Horse and Chai trying to get a hitch from the grocery story.   Stopped by and chatted with them for a bit.   They are going back on the trail tomorrow morning.   I suspect I’ll catch up to them at some point.   It took them 30 minutes before someone finally picked them up.   I’ll have to go through that routine tomorrow.  

I’m resupplied for the next 7 days in the bush. Tomorrow I’ll head back up to the Kracker Barrel General Store and wait around for Stormtrooper to show up. Then it is back on the trail !

Here is a picture of last night’s tent site

After my dinner of instant mashed potatoes last night, I’m down to a fig bar, some granola, and half roll of sweet tarts. On the bright side, my pack is nice and light 🙂 I’ve been putting a lot of effort into getting extra miles in over the last few days so I can hit Whites Pass around noon.

To be honest, over the last couple days all I can think about is pizza and burgers. Sometimes, when my mind wanders a bit, I can even smell them. Food. Milk shakes. Anything fried. Fresh fruit. I’m thinking about all of that and more. Guess hiker hunger has really grabbed me.

Today, I’ve a little descent, then another 2k climb up to 6.5k. After that, it is downhill for 6 miles to Whites Pass at ~4k. I’m back in the woods for the most part during the descent. There is a burned out section which gives me a short mosquito break, then they come back when I bottom out.

Just before I start the last big climb, I run into a group of backpackers hiking out. 3 40 something guys and one of their teenage boys. The teenager looks like he doesn’t want to be there, heh. They are asking me all these questions about thru-hiking and seem genuinely interested. I’m in a bit of a hurry so I cut the conversation short saying something about burgers and beer. One of the guys keeps up with me for a few minutes chatting, then he drops back. I can hike the shit out of most backpackers right now. It feels good to be in that kind of shape.

Anyway, I climb this last hill, and get a nice view of an alpine lake as well as the last bowl I’ll see before dropping into the trees.

I’m thinking how cool it would be to ski this stuff in the winter. Then on my left, through the trees, I see a chair lift. Apparently there is a ski resort on the other side of the hill. Well how about that? Might need to make a trip up here one day with my planks.

I took a final break before heading into the trees, chatting with yet another crop of SOBO’s. It is funny because I’m noticing the further North I go, more and more of these SOBO’s want to talk. They want to exchange trail names, etc. Then it hits me. These folks have only been on the trail for a few weeks. They are still nooblets.

After eating my last fig bar and polishing off the last of my water, I had 6 miles to go and it is all downhill. I was making good time rocking downhill with my treking poles at an easy jog.  Hot, Hungry, Dirty, and Dry. I decended into Wites Pass like a meteor. 

I covered the 15 miles in little over 5 hours, rocking a 3 mile/hr pace.

As luck would have it, a trail angel was dropping off a hiker and offered me a ride. Trevor took me over to the general store to pick up my resupply package, then drove me down to Packwood for the room I booked at the Packwood Inn. The dude was pretty interesting. He works for Chehalis Indian Reservation as a gaming agent. He was full of interesting facts about legal jurisdiction of the State on Reservation territory.

Apparently, this tribe is very financially successful. All tribal members get a ~$30k check every year. The tribe has used money from their Casino to start up all sorts of other business ventures like brewing craft beers, construction, a state of the art hospital, and tons of other businesses. They are even expanding the reservation’s land by buying up nearby parcels. Every kid gets a full ride scholarship to the university of their choice.

Trevor dropped me at the Inn around 1:00 and the first thing I did was leave my pack at the office and go looking for fried anything and draft beer. Well, it turns out that the good town of Packwood has four places to eat. The first is a bar which is closed until 3:00. The next option is a pizza place where one of the employees tested positive for Covid and that’s closed to Friday. Craft Brewery ? Closed until 3:30. Finally, I walk to the edge of town to a burger joint. They are closed with a “Will be back” dial set to 11 Is that AM or PM? I’ve no idea.

All things eventually work out and I get my meal at 3:30. I head back to the Inn and drop into the bathtub for a long soak. Here’s the result.

For this stretch I did 149 miles in 6.5 days averaging ~23 miles a day. I never expected to keep that kind of pace in Washington. Looking ahead, I suspect I’ll have to slow down somewhat given the steeper terrain, but I’m feeling like I am going to finish this thing. I’ve ~350 miles left !

 

Got up early this morning and chatted with my hapless companion Jeff while packing. He is a physics and calculus teacher with a masters in Geology. He seemed an interesting character, but I was pretty sure he isn’t interested in doing my kind of mileage. Besides the bugs were biting and he still hadn’t got out of his tent by 6:30, so that settled it.

I took a quick picture of the mosquito bog next to our camp site. Nasty.

The first couple hours was flat, slightly downhill to 5k. Then it was time to do some climbing which would eventually top out at 7.5k. Ran into this guy in the lowland area. I guess it was a quayle…dunno.

Trail Chicken

All morning I was running into SOBO’s. They kept gushing about the spectacular views up ahead, but so far it was just trees and mosquitoes. Around 12:30, I could tell something good was coming

Then, there it was.

First Pass

Gigantic bowls with snow fed streams turning into creeks which turned into rivers. It was just amazing. Honestly there is no point in writing about it, I’ll just lay out the pictures and videos I took.

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After all that fun it was getting pretty late. I walked the knife edge along this path

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The trail in that picture took a little over an hour to cover, after which I dropped into one of the bowls. Got mobile service for a few minutes and chatted with Alice until it dropped. Also got a load of text messages from Stormtrooper. He thinks he will be at Whites Pass on Friday. Looks like I’ll be seeing him soon.
I found a nice flat sheltered spot at the edge of the tree line. Setup my tent, talked to a few SOBO’s who were passing by, and crashed. What a day.

 

 

Today I’m walking around Mt Adams. Kind of excited about this, because the trail is finally going to get up to 6k. But first, I need to do some climbing. The morning starts off normal.

Then passes through another old burn

Then it turns into a wildflower windfall. Honestly I just kept taking pictures. Reds, yellows, blues, whites, oranges. Butterflies of various colors flying around. It was gorgeous. Here is a bunch of pics.

Flowers

Starting to get some good views of the surrounding area. Here is Rainier off in the distance

Then some more flowers

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I passed a popular camp site that was loaded to the gills. Nobody was there, I think they must be climbing some summit trail nearby.

Run into some lava poop mixed in with the fields.

 

Papa and John and I have been lapping each other all day. They take a break and I pass them. I take a break and they pass me.

Eventually, I just fall in behind them and we hike together for a while. They are a little slower than me but not so much that it throws me off. We spend an hour chatting a bit. Papa is from a little town North of Sacremento. John is from Cost Mesa in Orange county. They are cousins who did a big chunk of the PCT in 2019. They plan to finish Washington, then go down to the high Sierra and do the chunk they skipped because of snow in ’19. They are solid hikers.

So it turns out to be serendipity that we were hiking together, because up ahead is a nasty water crossing called Adams Creek. We talked to a SOBO hiker who told us there are three sets of logs upstream that we can stitch together for a dry crossing. Here’s what that bad boy looked like.

Adams Creek

Looking at the video, it really doesn’t capture how deep and fast running this thing was. Honestly it was scary. I was clearly off my game, because I thought I was taking videos of the guys crossing, but failed to press the button. Only thing I got was John leading the way across the first log. That water under his feet is about 3 feet deep (I checked with my poles). Falling on any of these spots would probably have resulted in a SAR call.

After that, we paused for a bit to let the adrenaline rush wind down. We were all laughing and relieved. Hope I never have to do this again.

I walked with the guys for a bit longer. Then they stopped for a break. They said their goal was Lava Spring at 2250 which is short of my goal. So I said goodbye and kept charging on my own. Rest of the day was mostly good views, flowers, and nice trail.

Made it into Goat Rocks Wilderness and camped in a mosquito infested nightmare of a tent site at around 8pm. I figured this one would suck, but it puts me in the right position for the big climb tomorrow.

While I was drifting off to sleep another section hiker showed up asking all sorts of questions about the trail to Walupt lake, how heavy my pack was, and various other random things. I’m sitting in my tent doing my best to help this guy, who must have donated a pint of blood to the mosquitoes while we were talking. FInally he asks if he can setup near me….which is a silly question to a thru-hiker. If there is room, then the answer is always yes. I fell asleep to the sound of him slapping mosquitoes inside his tent.

Did 28 miles and almost 5k of climbing today !