PCT: Day 100

It’s hard to believe we’ve been at this for 100 days now.  The beginning of the trail feels like years ago, and even the start of the Sierra seems like the distant past.  We take our time getting up today, waiting for the sun to hit our campsite before we start to pack in earnest.  We didn’t have frost last night, but this is the coldest morning we’ve had lately.

The trail from camp leads steeply up to Glen Pass over the next mile.  We climb slowly, still not fully acclimated to being above 10,000 feet again, and reach the top an hour later.  The view from the top looks down into the beautiful Rae Lakes which we’ll hike through on the way down. 

Our decision to wait for snow to melt pays off as we cross no more than 50ft of snow on the descent.  However, the descent is full of steep rocky steps which do not agree with Blue Lizard’s knees.  The first 2 miles of descent goes slower than the climb and we don’t make it to the first lake until lunch.  We take a long lunch/ fishing break and catch fish after fish after fish.

The hike after lunch is a little faster, but continues to be rocky, and we have to stop before we reach the 8 mile mark as Blue Lizard still has a lot of knee pain.  The next few days are likely to have similar trail conditions with the big problem being that we packed food assuming we’d cover almost twice the distance as we did today.  If we cover similar miles the next few days, we’ll run out of food well before our next resupply. 

We scour our maps to see if there is an earlier exit.  There is, but it exits on the western side of the Sierra and would take hours and hours of bus rides to get back to our van on the eastern side.  It isn’t the best option but is the only one we’ve got so we plan to hike the 15 miles out the next day.  We talked to someone who had come in the same way and gathered that it is mostly downhill and ends at a parking lot with 50+ cars which means a good chance to hitch.  After deciding on our plans we quickly get into our tents since we’re now into mosquito season in the Sierra and are getting swarmed.