Day 38: Mosquitos Will Be The Death Of Me.

June 17th, 2021

Mile Marker:795

Miles Hiked Today: 13

I’m not going to lie, I woke up this morning and stared at our motel ceiling thinking about how I wanted to take another 0 day and lay in bed all day. Yesterday was nice, but I only had a couple hours of laying in bed time. Rest was calling my name.

However, we all knew we needed to get back out to the trail today and that we would try our best to get into town early for the next time.

Around 8 am we finally headed out the door to the Main Street to try and hitch a ride back to the trail head or even to the next town of Independence.

We stood at an intersection sticking our thumbs out with smiles…waving at people…doing dances… doing anything to get someone to pick us up. We unfortunately had zero luck. Some people honked, some people gestured a sorry like gesture, and one guy told us that we would maybe get a ride if we showed our tits…..

I immediately imagined me throwing my trekking pole like a javelin at his fancy car.

Needless to say, the town of Bishop was NOT the best for hitching out of town. We then migrated down the street some and did the same thing… No dice.

We got desperate and started making some phone calls of numbers we had seen on the Guthooks app. We finally got one lady that would come get us. She was about an hour out.

At least it was something. We decided to go to the local bakery in the meantime.

I felt like I was wasting time since we had originally planned for a 20 mile day and quickly knew that that was no longer going to happen.

Our ride came and she started telling us about herself and her journey. How she had walked away from meth and that world and is now living on her own, figuring out life. Currently she is a “taxi” for hikers right now because she said we are people she needs to be around. That we are respectful and open minded. I liked hearing this, because I knew personally that our group had always tried to be so thankful and hoped others were too. Wishing her the best of luck on her journey finding what makes her happy. ❤️

We finally arrived at the trail head and started hiking close to noon. The most frustrating part for me was that we had 7 miles of non PCT miles. We had to hike ourselves back to the PCT and then start.

Our packs were heavy and we had two passes to ascend. Meaning we were having to go up and up and up with breaking shoulders.

The frustration wanted to build but the views….. just kept getting better. Especially with the clouds forming above. It’s hard to stay mad with views like this.

We crossed over our second pass, Glen Pass, on the PCT and then planned for 8 more miles to camp.

Things were going fine until we realized the descent down was extremely technical and we weren’t moving as fast as we normally did.

Then, after 3 miles or so, it started raining. The clouds no longer looked nice and we started to get a little worried about how it was going to play out.

We were fine until I watched lightening strike up on the high mountains and listened as the thunder echoed in the valley. Planner and I started to get a little paranoid. We were below the tree line thank God but still, there weren’t as many trees as we would have liked.

We hiked on a little bit longer and then sat under a couple big trees trying to decide what to do.

Tide and Bottleneck showed up and we all waited for a little bit and hiked on for a little under a mile in the rain and decided to set up camp. It was 4 miles short of our goal of reaching 10 PCT miles but we felt like it was the smart thing to do. I had ptsd coming on from all our rainy days on the AT. I felt myself becoming worried it was going to rain a lot but after an hour or so it started to settle down.

And as the rain let up, the mosquitos came out to play.

Holy heck… Mosquitos may be the death of us. Since this is an extremely low snow year, the mosquitos are not wanting to play nice. We arrived and immediately were swarmed by mosquitos. We kept our rain jackets on and put on rain pants as mosquito blockers but none of us had a head bug net but Conrad.

I set up as fast as I could, threw my bag inside, and tried to zip up my tent as fast as I could. Somehow 3 mosquitos still made it inside.

Making dinner was a hoot. We all were walking while eating or walking while it cooked to keep them from swarming us. Any thing we had to do outside of our tents required us to pace back and forth to keep from a swarm. I have never seen this many mosquitos. Absolutely insane.

Since the mosquitos were outrageous we all stayed out in our own tents all night.

Now we know what to expect coming down to water and the valleys. We know that we have to do more of our eating and resting at higher altitudes.

Once again, learning and adapting.

What a weird roller coaster of a day!

Iz and Oz