Got to spend some time in the pit toilet before leaving. That was some luxury. It does not even smell bad anymore. Either they are cleaner in Northern Cal or I’m dirtier.

My toes hurt. Damn shoes. They have gone from awesome to a foot compactor.

The trail picked up just outside the camp site, which was a nice change. The climb was rough going up, but after hitting some plateau it was an easier ascent.

Arrived at this river crossing

I almost gave up and walked through it, but fortunately scouted around and found this log.

<Pic Log>

After that it was some crossing through marshes like this.

And relatively nice trail

Next to miles of marsh land. With the marsh comes mosquitoes. Hoards of mosquitoes. I dial up the pace but these damn things are still landing on me. When I stopped and pulled out the earbuds, I realize just how bad it is. They are all over me. Bastards. I threw my pack on the ground and was dancing around while trying to fish out my deet. That got sprayed on everything. Me, my hat, my pack. It seemed to help a little, so I packed up and jammed out of there.

Around 11ish I left the Marsh and stopped for a little brunch.

Jackalope shows up and tells me that Soho is coming up behind him. When he shows up we hike together for a while and run into Ricky Bobby at the first lake.

Somehow I get in the lead of our little group and get a burst of energy. The trail is exposed because of a recent burn, but flat, straight, and soft. I turned up the music and hammered out a total of 12 miles, only stopping to say hi to Jackalope and Canada Joe while I passed. Ricky Bobby kept up for a while, but eventually fell back.

We have passed mount Doom without the eye of Mordor spotting us.

I made it to Hat creek at 3. Did ~20 miles in 8 hours. Soho showed up 30 minutes later while I was having lunch. Ricky Bobby turned up, hung out, then pressed on. Later in the evening Canada Joe, Papa Bear, his niece Chatter showed up. I was already in my tent half asleep by 7. Sometime during the night Sonny turned up as well.

Tomorrow it is breakfast at JJ’s in Old Station. I can get used to this.

Today my feet hurt. I packed them into my shoes so they hurt some more. Got a bruise on each of my second toes where they are squished against the front of the shoe. 

Plan today is to hike 4 miles past the Lassen park boundary and use the bear boxes to store our food. The park has a new policy requiring bear canisters and I’m definitely not going to be packing one of those things.

I took off before Soho today and put some climbing miles in. While going up a dude named Papa Bear passed me. He’s a 60 something guy hiking a section with this niece. He stops every couple hours to have a smoke and I catch up.  The guy still outpaces me. Wow do I suck that much?

Hiking was mostly unremarkable. Still nice to see all the green and trees. Here’s some pics

 

A couple miles into Lassen park we passed Boiling Spring Lake. Found Papa Bear lounging under a bush, smoking a cig. This lake is most definitely not a good water source. Looks like it will dissolve my bag, filter, and most of my intestines.

Hiked the PCT to a side trail leading to Drakesbad. The place is known to take care of hikers….but only after the paying guests are cared for.

Got there around 1 and met a few others there (Terminator and a couple of Southies). They explain the rules. We are to sit at the table between the dining hall and the horse corral. The guests get the deck and all the clean areas. We get the dirt and a table.   Accommodations befitting our current social status. Papa Bear, Canada Joe, and the Czech Bam Bam turn up just as the paying guests finish lunch. We are turned loose on the dining hall’s buffet which we swarm like locusts. Many plates were consumed. The remaining guests scatter in fear.

The rest of the day was spent chatting, showering, laundry, and lounging in our table by the corral. Occasionally we’d run over to the gift shop for ice cream and sodas. Most of us were waiting around for dinner. Occasionally we run into the guests who look at us with a mixture of concern, disgust, and curiosity. It is fun to watch.

While sitting around, a gal named Ricky Bobby shows up. She is a 20 yr old Canadian who apparently likes to “Go Fast”. Soho and I keep hitting her with Talladega Nights quotes, but she doesn’t get them. Apparently the movie did not make the same impression on her it did us. Sonny also turned up around 7. Apparently she ditched her Malaysian pack-a-day partner.

Watching Canada Joe go through his resupply package was interesting. This guy’s strategy is…unique. Cans of spam, sardines, chili, and other random heavy stuff combined with mountain house dehydrated. He ended up dropping off half of it in hiker box.

The Dinner bell rang around 6:30. All the guest enter the dining hall and deck to get an awesome meal served by white coated wait staff. We sit at our table in the dirt and look on. Then, at 8, a gal comes over with placemats, silverware, glasses, etc. Chicken or stuffed tomatoes plate is $18. Prime rib is $31. Our cheap asses all order chicken. The Chef takes sympathy on us and gives us BOTH a stuffed tomato and chicken. Wedge salad and desert. It was excellent. He came out after it was served to check on us. Nice touch. We’d been happy with a couple bowls of chili.

After this we headed over to Warner campground and crashed at Papa Bear’s campsite. There are 9 tents all crowded in a site for one car camper. Nice end to a 15 mile day.

Up and out before 7. Got a nice sleep at that campsite. So nice to be on a level pad. Scrappy and Sing Song passed our site before I left. They were 2 miles back….early risers.

The bad news is that my toes are killing me. They are cramped up in my shoes. The same size 11.5 shoes I have been wearing comfortably for the last 600 miles. Apparently it is common for our feet to flatten out and get wider and/or longer during a through-hike. Well, it looks like I need to jump yet another half size. Now instead of 10.5/11 shoe size, I need a size 12. At the next stop I’m ordering some new ones.

Today’s hike was generally bland. Mostly mellow ups and downs through a few creeks and rivers.

Hit the HALF WAY MARKER today at 1320!!!! Well, I did skip 450 miles in the High Sierra, but I’ll take the Win.

I caught up with Scrappy around 11:30am, passed her but she kept up and seemed to want to talk. So, I started information mining her.

She is a graduate student in Neuroscience and is also a behavioral therapist. She is doing research in Salt Lake around a behavioral therapy to help people break their opioid addiction. (drericgarland.com). The program is called MORE and involves training/therapy in mindfulness, reappraisal, and savoring. It took about 4 miles of hiking to understand what all this stuff means. Anyway, the theory is that opioid addiction to some degree started with individual’s brains being out of balance in one or more of these areas. As they continued to use them, it reinforces pathways that feed this negative behavior. This therapy attempts to reverse it.

This is all mostly therapy yadda, yadda, which I mostly don’t get and could care less about. I equate it to the old advertising saying: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”

The thing I found interesting is that she is going to attempt to measure changes in the brain using an FMRI. Now that is something I buy into. Physical evidence of the behavior therapy effectiveness would be a leap forward, imo. She also believes there may be other therapy which could reduce certain psychosomatic symptoms like swelling and arthritis, once again measured via FMRI. They have a $20m grant to do their opioid research, so I guess the NSF thinks it promising.

At this point in the hike, I have closed the loop on the opioid “epidemic”. First with some nurses I hiked with who bitched about the requirement to manage a patient’s pain. The infamous question we all get at the clinic/hospital to rate our pain from 1 to 10. Then I chatted with a gal in charge of surveying discharged patients which carries a 2% increase in reimbursement for reaching some threshold. One of their questions is “How was your pain managed?” Now I talk to a gal who is researching how to get folks off of pain meds after they have become hooked.

Full circle. I think the problem in all this is the patient. Give them an easier way out and they’ll generally take it. If I didn’t know all the hazards, I would. Basically everything below my waist is aching, sore, or swollen since I started this hike.   

Ok, now, back to the hike. It was mostly green tunnel stuff. Here are a couple good pics

Stopped at Soldier Creek (1325) for some lunch and lounging. Scrappy hung around with us for a couple hours waiting for Sing Song who eventually showed up. Somehow he got behind us and was hiking mega slow.

Bunch of south bounders showed up. They bounced to Ashland like so many others we have met on the trail.

Around 3 we packed up and headed to Stover Spring.

We setup in an RV camp with some other hikers. Sonny, a 6 foot 1 female Taiwanese basketball player who is hiking with a Malaysian gal who smokes a pack a day. The Malaysian seems to be jumping around on the trail and is complaining about health issues. I don’t think her 8 mile/day pace is going to cut it. Sonny seems ready to ditch her partner. That should be interesting.

Soho and I setup camp, ate dinner, and zipped up in our tent. We were chatting that a beer would be a nice nightcap. None of the RV campers were offering. Then at 8, a guy next us pulls up to his trailer. He is blaring country music…ugh. But, it turns out he has a cooler full of Coors and a mood for sharing 🙂 Unzip the tents and we head over. Soho keeps him busy talking about country music, the sawmill, and, of course, guns. Meanwhile I take down a 24 and Bacardi + coke. Had to deal with country music for an hour before that guy finally knocked out. Can’t always get what you want…..

19 mile day. Tomorrow we are getting some love at Drakesbad

 

Turned out the sleep wasn’t that bad actually. When I rolled around, there was lots of crunching sounds, but aside from that it was good. We turned out of camp at 7.

The climb continued to be miserable. Here is the sequence: Level/slight climb, then super steep climb up some dry/semi-dry creek bed, then over a swollen creek. Those were agility tests. Here is couple of pics.

 

Soho captured a video of my expert crossing technique.   I’ll add it when I get decent Internet. 

<Video of crossing>

Then, we hit this crossing.

Soho and I stood there looking at it for a while. The lower path looked straightforward, but with the guarantee of somewhat wet feet. The top crossing could be totally dry, if you can make the jump over this:

Soho went low. I, of course, decided to go for all the bananas. Didn’t go well. I jumped on the angled rock next to the little waterfall. First I noticed the algae on the rock, then I noticed that my foot was on it, then I slowly slide straight into the water up to my waist. Sucked. I dropped one of my poles downstream. Soho grabbed it before it floated over the lower falls.

After falling in the water all my future water crossings became easier. I just stomped through them.

The climb went on, and on, and on. Traverse, climb, stomp through water. Passed some trail maintenance folks during their thing. About 12 of them, breaking rocks, laying cable, etc.

Soho took off ahead of me, he does better on these climbs.

Made it up to the first peak, which had a pleasant meadow. It also had an unpleasant dog leg in the trail.

I missed it, wondered around a bit, then found the trail again and kept hiking. It was going down hill. I was thinking how nice this is…then I notice stuff looked familiar…hmm.. Going the wrong way, again. Lost 40 minutes on that stupidly.

At least I get to see this twice.

Plan was to meet. Soho at Cold Springs (1304) for our afternoon break. I’m going to be late which means no lunch break for me. I switched to hiking 1 hr, stoping for some grazing on trail mix, then continuing.

At Cold Springs, I found Soho laying under a tree looking very comfortable. He had a nice 1 hr+ break talking to some hikers, Sing Song and Scrappy, who left earlier. I on the other hand would not be lounging. Just answered nature’s call, filled up with water, and got back on the trail. FML.

The folks in Butte seem to think this 8k peak is worth noting.

This is the county full of weird signs.

When we were on lookout rock before Belden we got our first view of mount Lassen. Some guy mentioned that it looked like Mount Doom looming over the horizon. We are getting closer, my Precious!

 

Camped near a spring at 1313. It was a haul to get water, but since Soho volunteered it was great for me :). 22 miles today….well 22 miles of progress, I clocked closer to 24.

I spent most of the day in Belden updating this blog.

Belden has 7 permanent residents. Life in this “town” is centered around the bar.  That’s where you order food, pay for stuff from the general store, get a room, catch up on gossip, etc.  Soho went down to the bar and asked about a late check out.  The gal at the bar says, “Oh, I didn’t even know the room was rented.”  So I guess that was a yes.  I stayed there until 4.

Meanwhile, down at the bar, Soho and I learned a little about the work life in Belden.  Folks wake around 7 and do some yard work. Another gal cleans the rooms, well, at least the ones that she knows about.  Then around 11 or 12 they begin to collected around the corner of the bar, ordering shots of tequila, whiskey, beers, and whatever.  All goes on the tab.  By 3 they are all trashed…..and the cycle repeats.

Soho and I left at 6.   We were heading toward a nasty climb.    5k over 15 miles.   Brutal.   

<Pic Elevation Profile>

After crossing the road and on the trail head, it was straight up. No relief, just climbing. Fortunately the hill blocked the sun most of the time, so we got a little lucky there.

There was a big fire through this canyon. But the trees are recovering well.  Much better than So Cal.  Guess the water helps.

 

Ran headlamps until 10. We figured that every foot we get tonight when its cool will be one less to deal with tomorrow morning. We stopped at Myrtle Flat where there is supposedly some camp sites (1291).  Stumbled around for 30 minutes looking and eventually settled on a couple semi-flat spots with a bunch of branches laying everywhere. It sucked, but oh well.

Did 6 miles today and collected a couple thousand feet.