Day 63 – Well Done
Originally published on Mason Hikes the PCT 2017.
Mileage: 30 into and out of Sierra City (mile 1195)
My hiking philosophy is that I like to hike high miles, but I don’t want to let arbitrary mileage or a deadline dictate what I can or cannot do on trail. This means that instead of focusing on getting in my 30 miles at all costs and becoming a slave to the mileage, I will hike as far as I can but stop to explore whenever I see something cool like a cabin or to swim when I see a lake or river I’d like to jump into. Today was my philosophical cheat day.
What I mean by that is that I did the opposite of what I usually try to do and hiked for 9 hours straight without taking my backpack off so that I could cover the 28.5 miles to Sierra City before the store closed. I stopped and sat to filter water twice (with my backpack on), but other than that, it was all hiking all the time. I was also using today as a test to see how fast I could hike for an extended time, so I couldn’t have any distractions from the goal. No swimming for me, though I was certainly tempted towards the end.
At these lower elevations, there’s a strange phenomenon that you begin to notice as you come down, and the atmosphere around you starts to become something that we in the business like to call “miserably hot”. All day, despite walking over snow, it was getting hotter and hotter as I descended, and it was somewhere around 90° in town. Yikes!
The first six hours of the hike flew by as I listened to some newly downloaded music, but as I neared the home stretch, hiking with no stops got pretty tedious. I just barely held on to my sanity as I finished the final push and arrived at the highway after 27 miles in 8.5 hours. I was planning to walk the 1.5 extra miles into town, but a nice man named John asked if I needed a ride, so I hitched in even quicker! Before he came along, I got heckled by a man in a car because I didn’t know where some obscure city in the area was located.
“What’d you leave home from Nebraska six months ago and hike all the way here? Is that why you don’t know your way around?”
“No, I left Mexico TWO months ago.”
“Whaaaaat? Really!?”
He ended up being a nice guy, but I still couldn’t help him with directions.
Once I got to town, I did my normal town things, like charge my devices, pick up my package, grab a Gatorade, and order a burger and milkshake. The burger was a 1 pound behemoth called The Gutbuster, so I was pretty excited, though it took a while to cook. In the meantime, I walked around the store, bought some snacks, talked to some hikers, and used the free wifi for a bit. Finally, after about 45 minutes, the burger was ready!
As much as it pains me to say this: booooo! That burger was the worst I’ve had on trail. It had everything a good burger needs, but it was cooked for WAAAAY too long and both the cheese and outside of the burger were burnt to a crisp. It was by far the most well done burger I’ve eaten in a long time, maybe ever. It also didn’t help that the bacon for which I paid extra wasn’t on there, but they were pretty slammed at the time and I didn’t need to bother them. I ate it all anyway because I’m a starving hiker, but I wasn’t particularly happy about it.
The one redeeming factor was the blackberry milkshake, which was delicious.
I finished my food, packed up my package food into my food bag, and then tried to update my blog on the wifi. It couldn’t handle uploading the pictures, and I was still had the taste of charred meat in my mouth, so I decided to get out of town and camp out on trail. I walked for about a mile and then managed to get a hitch with Nathan for the last half mile, which was pretty pointless, but he had a dog!
As we pulled up to the trailhead, I saw about 20 people standing around, most of them hikers. What in the world was going on? I got out, said thanks to Nathan, and was immediately offered a large glass of milk and a burger. Yes please!
The purveyors of this particular trail magic were some trail parents, stopping in to say hello to their son, Beast. They had all sorts of goodies and managed to make a lot of hikers quite happy, so thanks Beast’s parents! The milk was fantastic, the oranges were fantastic, and the burger was SOOOO much better than the one I had paid for an hour before. It was like the burger gods had heard my cries of “well-done is not well done!” and sent this family and grill to right all of Sierra City’s previous wrongs. I was a happy camper once more.
It was in this group of hikers at the trail magic that I received an attempted SECOND trail name: Harley. One of the hikers had been sitting at the Sierra Country Store eating his burger and shake when he looked down the road and saw a motorcycle driving through. He thought nothing of it since there are motorcycles driving through all the time, but as it got closer, he noticed something odd. A small fact that I may have left out about my hitch into town today was the fact that John was driving a Harley, so I showed up into town on the back of a motorcycle while still wearing my backpack. 😬 🏍 Vroom Vroom! (We went “slow”)
Once the trail angels left, I headed back to trail, but in the previous 30 minutes, about 15 people had gone north on the trail just before sundown. Camping was going to get cozy tonight… On my way up, I saw groups of 5 and 6 camping right off of the switchbacks, so I kept climbing up to the top, hoping that the “single tent spot” had been overlooked by everyone else. Nope! There were about 10 people up there, all camping wherever they could find a flat spot. As a tired hiker after 30 miles, I found a spot and camped there for the night with everyone else.
We had a nice fire, talked about the trail and how fast calories move through our bodies these days, and decided that we were faster hikers than the southbounders who skipped the Sierras and were coming back because we have been training on mountain passes at 10,000+ feet. As such, we’re going to beat them in our race to Ashland. It doesn’t matter at all to me since I’ll be leaving before that, but it’s pretty funny to hear people reason through which group will win the race. As for now, I’m just happy to be out here. 🙂