Day 84-85

Day 84, 16 miles, endpoint PCT mile 1169

Today was a good day: a great town stop and 16 miles hiked despite the detour into town. First thing this morning we hiked the three miles from our camping spot underneath Mt. Judah to the trailhead at Highway 40. The PCT crosses the highway at Donner Pass Summit, named for the poor group of pioneers who were stranded during wintertime in the area and were forced into canibalism. Neither Josh nor I ate breakfast that morning, so we were feeling a little hungry.

At the trailhead we were lucky to catch a ride eight miles down the highway into Truckee with a woman who had just dropped her husband off for a trail run. She was picking him up from a different spot later in the day and had no problem taking us straight to our desired location: a restaurant called the Squeeze In in downtown Truckee. There we ate a huge breakfast (I got french toast stuffed with cream cheese) that we decided was in celebration of our wedding anniversary the day before.

After breakfast we walked a couple blocks along the main street to check out a gallery of a photographer Josh was familiar with. She had many landscapes on display in her gallery of locations in Yosemite, the High Sierras, and Lake Tahoe, so it was cool to see photos of the places we had been. The woman working at the gallery knowingly eyed our packs. She told us about a trip she took with a girlfriend when she was younger, hitchhiking across Canada. At the end of the trip, when she arrived in Vancouver, B.C., she met the man who would become her husband. Many, many years later, they are still married.

After gallery we grabbed a few more snacks from the convenience store then went back out to the main road to hitch back to the trailhead. It was only a few minutes until a woman in a BMW SUV stopped for us. We had to rearrange the vegetables she had bought from the farmer's market in the backseat, but soon enough we were off. She told us she always looks for people with backpacks, because she knows they are hikers. On the way back up to Donner Pass, we chatted about Truckee, her daughter who is going to school to be a physician's assistant, photography, and her recent knee replacement surgery. She wistfully told us about the trip she and her husband took years ago, sailing from Seattle to Juneau, Alaska for six months. When she dropped us off, she grabbed a couple of pieces of fresh fruit and insisted we take them with us. Thank you!

We started hiking and immediately had views of Donner Lake far below. We went under Interstate 80, then began a climb up towards Castle Peak. From there it was some easy up and down terrain to our campsite for the night in an open meadow. It is a full moon, the stars are out, and it is not too cold. Good end to a good day.

Donner Summit

Anniversary breakfast splurge.

Truckee is a great town

Back on the trail, overlooking Donner Lake

Tunnel under the freeway... not in the wilderness.

Carla has become fascinated with the story of the Donner Party.

Trail views

Happy fungi

Day 85, 26 miles, endpoint PCT mile 1195

We left the meadow and headed uphill where we had views of a distant peak and a lake below it. I'm not sure what mountain it was, but we had views of it off and on all day. Its snowless top was like a jagged broken beer bottle; it stood taller than anything else within eyesight. I may be wrong, but I think we may have seen the last of the snowy peaks until Mt. Shasta in several hundred miles.

Our hardest climb today was a 700 footer; besides that, and a few smaller hills, we had an overall loss of elevation over the course of the day. The hiking was fast and relatively easy. We covered the 26 miles in about 10 hours. It was also hot as hell and we had a 12 mile waterless stretch--I think we will be seeing more of that in the near future.

Right now we are camped in the lowlands at about 5,000 feet. Tomorrow morning we will make a quick stop just off the trail in the small town of Sierra City to refill our food. From there it will be six more days until our next town, so we will have a bit of a long stretch in the woods coming up.

Trail views

Trail views

Trail views