13 Miles
Slept in and casually packed up our stuff. Breakfast at Bridgeside again before we started hiking for the day. I was excited to finally get to walk across a state border, even if it wasn’t how we originally thought it would happen when we started the trail. The bridge is exhilarating as a pedestrian. The views in all directions are beautiful, but there’s the thrill side of it too. You share the road with cars and an 18-wheeler rolled past us about 1 foot away. Not to mention the surface of the bridge is metal grating, so you can see straight down to the water under your feet. The trail starts heading up and through dense forest full of poison oak and blackberry bushes. I was glad to be back on trail, but I knew we were missing some fun back in town. It was very tempting to stay and hang out with Studio another night, but I think we’ll just try to meet back up when we return from Ohio. Back in the Sierra, near Chicken Spring Lake, I lost my PCT pin. The hardware store in Wrightwood hands them out for free to hikers and I had mine on the strap of my pack. We had stopped for lunch near the stream by the corral just before Chicken Spring Lake and I’m pretty sure the pin was somewhere in the grass there. Today, a few miles before camp, I found the same pin! I’m not going to suggest that it was mine, but it could be! What’s funnier is that on our way out of Bridgeside this morning I broke off my Colorado pin. I’ve hiked with that one since the Mexican border so it’s been through a lot the past 4 months, but today was its limit.
PCT Hike 