Day 74 – Failures
Originally published on Mason Hikes the PCT 2017.
Mileage: 28
I woke up fairly early (6AM) in the Mt. Shasta KOA and was surprised to see most of my neighbors already getting up and leaving. I thought *hikers *were the early birds! I ate a few delicious muffins that my mom sent me (thanks, ma!) and packed up my stuff to leave. It was a sad farewell as I passed the glorious pool and air conditioned common room, but I needed to get back to trail.
As I was packing, I had a slight equipment failure as the zipper on my tent failed and split open as I was closing it, but I was able to close it by being very careful. The zipper isn’t particularly robust on the ultralight Big Agnes tents, and using my gear all day every day for over 10 weeks has definitely had an impact. Hopefully it will last!
On the way to the highway, I found a breakfast joint called the Black Bear Diner, which seemed good enough to justify delaying my hike by a tiny bit. I sat for a while and had the country scramble, which was scrambled eggs and sausage on top of biscuits and smothered in gravy. The muffins had given me a good start to the day, but this was what I needed to climb out of town. I left feeling extremely full and satisfied, ready for the day ahead.
When we hitch on trail, it’s usually on a back road or single-lane highway where hikers are a common sight. The hitch out of Mt. Shasta was on I-5, a gigantic interstate highway that runs from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific coast (maybe I should have hiked that?). I positioned myself by the southbound onramp, stuck out my thumb, and hoped for the best! 👍🏼 I was ignored by most of the cars I saw, but after about 15 minutes, a kind older man named Bob stopped to help me out. He knew all about the trail and picks up any hitching hikers that he sees, so before I knew it, he had me at the trailhead and ready to go. Thanks, Bob!
It was around 9AM when I started hiking, and boy oh boy, it was already hot. With thousands of feet of climbing ahead of me, it was going to be a warm day. I shortly passed the 1500-mile mark, which I promptly celebrated by taking a picture and continuing to hike towards the 1600-mile mark. 🎉
As I entered the Castle Crags Wilderness and continued to climb, more things started to go wrong. First, my belt gave out. Having lost a bit of weight on the trail, I no longer fit correctly in my hiking pants and I heavily relied on my belt to keep my pants on. As I was tightening it today, the buckle snapped open and wouldn’t stay closed afterwards. 😕 The pants were in ruins at this point, but at least I could count on my belt to hold the ruins up on my waist before. I eventually tried carefully and managed to get it to stay closed, but I’ve lost a lot of faith at this point.
I got to the first water of the day at No Name Creek and took a quick break to stock up before the climb. I had filled my bottles from the creek and had decided to fill my filter bottle as an extra liter of water, so I was walking over to the creek while taking the filter off for one last fill up. As I did so, I saw the filter’s O-ring come off of the filter and rest on the top of the bottle. I watched as it slowly slid off the top and fell towards the ground, where it bounced off a rock and fell onto another rock right in the middle of the creek. Slowly but inevitably, the O-ring slid down the face of the rock and dropped directly into the rapids of the creek, quickly disappearing from view in an instant. Just like that, it was gone.
For those of you that have never used a Sawyer Squeeze, there are two important components: the filter and the O-ring. The filter is what actually takes the gunk out of your water as you push water through it. The O-ring is what allows you to form a seal with which you can squeeze the water through the filter. Without it, the filter is essentially worthless. Ruh roh. 😮
I knew this about the filter because I had brought it on a prior hiking trip and someone had temporarily lost the O-ring, rendering it completely useless. As a precautionary measure, I had written to Sawyer to request an extra O-ring just to be safe, which they gladly mailed to me. I had conveniently left this extra O-ring on my bedroom dresser for my PCT trip, rendering IT completely useless. Yay!
Well now I didn’t have a useable filter on one of the hottest days I’d seen on trail when I would need tons of water. That’s not good. I had some iodine as a backup water purification method, but that’s not meant as a long-term solution and I was hesitant to drink too much iodine water in one day. As I continued climbing the mountain made of fire, that hesitation quickly went out the window and I was chugging liters of iodine-purified H2O in no time. Hopefully my thyroid survives!
The climb was really tough, both from the grade and from the heat, so it was slow going for much of the day. I ran into some other hikers taking mid-day siestas at water sources, but I pushed on, eager to stop climbing as fast as I could, though our views of Castle Crags were getting better and better with the elevation gain.
I eventually ran out of my iodine water and needed some more, so I stopped at a “creek” and decided to try to use the filter without my O-ring. I figured that most of the water would come out of the dirty end of the filter, but maybe SOME of it would come out of the clean end. I didn’t want to contaminate the clean water, so I wrapped my handkerchief around the dirty end to corral the waste water and started to try the filtering process. It was horrible and splashed everywhere and took about 5 liters to create one clean liter, but it worked. Slowly. Filling up my water bottles now took about 25 minutes, as compared to the 5 it took previously. Ugh. At least I had clean water. I met a few other hikers at the water, including Unicorn, who was from Seattle and lives a few blocks from me!
Thankfully, it got cooler and cooler the higher I climbed, and the views were getting more and more spectacular despite the haze.
I decided that I needed to hike to a water source for the night because of how hard it was to filter water, so I set my sights on one about 28 miles from where I started this morning, hoping I could camp there. I walked through a beautiful, blood-red, smoky sunset before finally making it to my spring just after dark, where I found a “campsite” (semi-flat, semi-clear spot) and set up camp for the night.
I filtered a ton of water so I wouldn’t have to in the morning and then made an old school Mountain House that I found in a hiker box. They’re supposed to be good for 30 years, right?
Yes, this used to be the cooking process
Hopefully tomorrow is far less uphill and my things decide to stop breaking, otherwise I’m going to be in trouble pretty soon!
Bonus picture of a cool lizard