18 miles
After tearing down camp, our first stop was to Paradise Valley Cafe. 5 miles on trail and then another mile to the cafe. Of course, I got the breakfast burrito and a tall glass of OJ. The place was abuzz with hikers milling about, filling water bottles from the spigot out front, eating, thumbing hitches into town, looking homeless, but happy about it. The regular patrons, I’m sure, get a kick out of us. After eating, we walked the mile back to the trail and started what we hoped were easy miles. The forecast had called for colder weather today, and it wasn’t *as* hot as yesterday, but we struggled. The sun beat down just the same, despite the cold winds. We did 8 miles to our water source, which was by far the nastiest looking water we’ve gotten yet. On the way there, one of the guys in the group we’ve been leap-frogging walked quickly by us. He was carrying burgers from the cafe and two of them were for Jim and Sophie, who we had passed a couple miles ago. They said, in passing, they’d see us ahead at Tunnel Spring. This guy didn’t really know where they were, but as I saw him head up the side trail to a different spring, I yelled to him that I think he needs the other side trail (The trail junction lead to two different springs, both side trails are reported to suck. The one we took certainly did.) Nico (from France) was coming up and confirmed that the hikers were, indeed, down at the spring like I thought. Yay! Anyhow, we took a short lunch break at the gross spring, filled our bottles (wretch), and then climbed the 300 feet back up to the trail. Now, we needed to find our campsite. We planned to go another 7, but that wasn’t happening. We cruised along the ridge watching the clouds roll over into the valley and daylight was quickly dying. We found a clearing at a trail junction and decided to call it. Not the best place trail-etiquette-wise, but we were in a pinch not wanting to night-hike the rest of this ridge to find something more suitable. Set up quickly and jumped in. Tomorrow we have a full day of hiking and then town!
PCT Hike 