This post brought to you by Wind

The wind is keeping me awake, so here I am writing a blog post from my tent at 4:45 am.

Few things are as good as trail pizza. Evan and I were about halfway through a section of the trail when he realized he was running low on food. We reached a spot with a picnic bench and sat down for a break, when a hiker named Jude walked down the road and asked if we wanted to order pizza, because he’d gotten the number of a place that would deliver to the trail. Was I hungry? Not really. Did I want to gorge myself on pizza? Of course. And so it was. 30 minutes later, we were sharing too much pizza, followed by cake that a trail angel showed up with. Then Evan and I hiked another 6 miles, with pizza in our packs for breakfast. I was very impressed by our ability to keep walking even though we could barely tighten our hip belts around our stomachs.

One of the more terrifying moments I’ve experienced on trail happened yesterday. We accidentally hiked a closed, unmaintained section of the PCT, complete with lots of downed trees and washed out trail. The section had a “trail closed” sign on the northern end, but not the southern end where we entered. The worst/most dangerous washed out section had zero remnants of a trail for about 8 feet across with a 60 foot almost vertical drop down to rocks. With each attempt to cross, I’d set off rock avalanches beneath my feet, slide a bit and freak out. After a few attempts, I stood on one end and wrestled my panicky brain into trusting Evan to help me cross without falling. He pulled me across, I didn’t die, my hands were shaking, and onward we went. Luckily that was the last anxiety inducing obstacle of that section.

Near the end of the day, we were treated to a lovely sunset near the top of Baden Powell. And it made me hate hiking so much less than I did during that stressful morning.

On our way down from the top (in the dark), I noticed a police car waaay down the hill, near where I thought we’d planned on camping that night. I couldn’t see anything going on, just one police car with its lights turned on. I jokingly mentioned that maybe they were looking for us. Turns out they were, sort of. They’d been out looking for two lost day hikers and saw our headlamps from a couple of miles down the trail, so they waited to see if we were the lost folks they were looking for. Nope, not us. I hope they were able to find who they were looking for, since the temperature really dropped and the wind got crazy.

Oh, an update about the wind that kept me up this morning. It was so intense that it took out my tent for the last time. My poles were broken beyond field repair. Once we got into town, I got a ride to REI to pick up a replacement tent. It’s no wonder that my tent couldn’t stand up to the wind. Winds were so strong that they knocked multiple trucks over on the freeway. I saw at least 6 that were laying on their sides.