Day 7

18 miles
Of course it started to rain last night about an hour after we went to sleep. Both of us woke up at the same time and quickly got out of the tent to throw on the rain fly. We rolled the dice on those clouds and lost. The funniest part is that it only sprinkled for about 5 minutes off and on for the next hour. Later during the night I felt a slight bump underneath my leg. It happened a couple more times, but stopped and I fell back asleep. In the morning after packing up the tent, we found a new hole had come up from where I was laying. Some animal must have tried to dig out, but got blocked. Hah! We passed by two SOBO hikers, Hamstring (during a previous hike on the PCT he had tore his hamstring near Scissors Crossing) and Short Leash (wife would divorce him if he hiked the PCT, but eventually she said he could do it). Lunch is in the shade in old growth. We’re outside Timothy Lake and there are planes flying over nonstop. We met a hiker named Jay who told us they were flying 6 planes as fast as they could to a fire closer to Cascade Locks. Will need to look into that when we get to Government Camp tomorrow. He was fun to chat with, even mentioned “freedom units” when referring to the temperature, which is much funnier to hear a person with an accent say out loud. Camp is next to a spring with 2 other hikers. They were very polite in letting us share the space. It can be awkward to pull up to the campsite we were aiming for and find that other people are already there. Thru-hikers, almost without question, will share their space with you if there’s room. Weekenders will likely not. You can usually tell them apart by their gear. Mosquitos in this spot are swarming, though we’ve avoided most of them by getting into the tent as fast as possible. Looking forward to doing laundry tomorrow, my clothes smell so bad. Also looking forward to a cold beer and a burger, but a shower will have to wait a few more days until we get to Cascade Locks.