A Song of Ice and Fire - PCT Section P Part 2 (Porcupine Lake to Etna Summit)

Pacific Crest Trail - Section P Part 2: Porcupine Lake to Etna Summit

Porcupine Lake, CA, Etna Summit, CA
Note: Stats below are totals for Section P
Distance: (One Way)  98.5 mi.
Total Elevation Gain: 17,594 ft.
Total Elevation Loss: 13,770 ft
Highest Elevation: 7,300 ft.
Dogs: Allowed, but logistically difficult
Difficulty: Moderate

Chris grabbed the headlamp and shined it on his backpack. Sitting on top, bold as brass, was the most enormous black rat. The rat looked at Chris with his headlamp, with an expression that seemed to say "What?! Come at me bro!"

Chris here. Allison's school work load has been quite high, so we decided I would author the rest of this post.

Back to the rat. Now you might think that the sudden explosion of light from the LEDs would be enough to frighten most wild animals. Well it wasn't. After a combination of smacking the side of the tent, the light and us shoeing it away verbally, the rat finally dismounted my backpack and disappeared into the night. The relief we felt was quite fleeting. Quick sidebar, Allison and I have the REI half dome 2 standard length tent and while it has served us well, it has always been a bit too short for yours truly. This means that at some point during the night most nights either my head or my feet end up touching the wall of the tent. Within seconds the rat traversed to the other side of the tent and I shit you not, ran straight into my head. This kind of behavior from an animal in the wild is the last thing I would have expected. At this point I was pretty sure we were both going to be eaten alive. We also decided that if this rat was brazen enough to headbutt me through the tent, it was probably not going to leave our stuff alone until it was fully satisfied that there was nothing left to eat or destroy. After coming to this conclusion I decided that we should move our packs into the tent. We ended up laying across the back of the tent and ended up attempting to sleep with our feet on top of them. Even after all of this, the rat kept moving around outside. Finally Allison's half asleep brain decided the only thing that was going to make it go away was to hiss at it like a cat. Surprisingly, this worked like a charm and the rat finally left for the rest of the night.

Doing something like the PCT is very trying, both physically and mentally. Most people, even those who aren't hikers have some understanding of this. More than a few people voiced concerns about how Allison and I would hold up, relationship wise, to the daily stressors of the trail. As most of you know, she and I have done plenty of outdoor adventuring in the past and were not really worried about relationship problems. This assumption proved true for 99+ percent of the hike. The morning after the rat incident was one of the exceptions. Our notes for this particular morning simply refer to it as fight morning. Looking back on it I'm pretty sure the fight mostly had to do with the fact that most normal human beings require a certain amount of sleep in order to get along well with other human beings and when both concerned parties don't get adequate sleep disagreements are almost inevitable. Allison, if you are reading this I just want to let you know that I'm not trying to have a fight about the fight! For most of my adult life I have, traditionally, been a morning person. I am also usually interested in breaking camp quickly and getting my hiking day started, especially when there is a certain mileage goal as was the case most days on the PCT. This was the case on fight morning except because of my lack of sleep I was also in a bad mood. This caused me to get frustrated when Allison wasn't getting ready fast enough because she wasn't feeling well. The discourse that followed lead us to both be in a bad mood as we left camp. As we got further down the trail, the argument evolved from being about breaking camp to being about how I was so interested in getting miles under our belt that it was like we were on a forced march. In our sleep deprived minds, I didn't care about taking any side trips off the trail to relax, see the sights or explore, and Allison didn't care about getting mileage in even though we had a limited amount of time in which to finish the hike. Of course, neither of these things were true, but as with many arguments, there wasn't much logic involved.

The argument was finally diffused when we ran into another hiker, “Yurt Man.” We ended up having a rather long, for us, conversation with him. During the course of the conversation we found out that he used to live blocks away from one of our old apartments in Seattle. We both actually remembered our respective residences. We also found out that he was one of the trail stewards for Washington.

Up until this point we had run into very few hikers going either direction. Thus, it is worth mentioning that, including Yurt Man, we ran into four other hikers in the span of about 20 minutes. One of the other gentlemen actually startled us. He was taking a break off the trail in the shade of a tree. We must have gotten within 10 feet of him before we noticed and tried to save face. He was a quite old, heavyset man who told us that he was not only planning to do the PCT, but also the CDT, and a trail neither of us had heard of, the Pacific Northwest Trail, which runs from Olympic national park to Glacier national park. Doing any one of these trails, much less all three back to back, is ambitious even for someone in peak physical condition. I think we both immediately had thoughts like, “man, is he going to make it without dying?” Shortly after this encounter we reached the highest point we would hike through in Northern California. It sat at approximately 7500'. This was also where we ran into our first snow of the trip. Allison and I decided to take a break before the first snow field to see if we had cellphone reception. While we were trying to figure this out, the older gentlemen passed us and started to traverse the snow fields. It was immediately evident that he was having a lot of trouble. It seemed that every few feet he would lose his balance and almost fall. It was painful and nerve-racking to watch. We were both thinking that at any moment, we might have to go into rescue mode. Luckily he made it across the first 200' long snow field successfully, but the journey took him approximately 20 minutes. When we finally got completely ahead of him a few minutes later we had a conversation about how we hoped he'd make it safely threw the trail going forward. We asked several Northbound hikers who passed us later in the trail about him, but no one had any information. We hope he is alright!

As the day wore on we passed Deadfall lakes and the Parks Creek trailhead.  We decided that this would be a great place to camp with friends or family sometime when we weren't through hiking.  Due to the the close proximity to several roads of we saw quite a few more hikers than usual on this day, including several couples who passed us while we were trying to eat cold rehydrated dehydrated mixed vegetables. Allison had been having some pretty big issues with her appetite throughout the beginning of the hike. We had been discussing what might be the culprit for a while at this point. We had almost certainly narrowed it down to the dehydrated vegetable mixture that we had spent so much time making. Initially we had planned to add some of this mixture to everyone of our dinners. On this day we decided that we would try to re-hydrate the vegetable mixture and eat it on its own to determine if Allison would have a better appetite for just the dinner on its own sans veges. It was immediately clear that cold re-hydrated veggies were terrible. We choked down as much as we could and then decided we would start trying to use them only in meals where they were less obtrusive like the beefy noodle bowl. Shortly after this, Allison's appetite got better much to our combined relief.

At 12.5 miles we were both done for the day and decided to stop when we reached this really cool rock prominence called Cement Bluff.  After eating a dinner while trying to keep ants out of or meal, we hit the sack.  In the morning I woke up to the sound of a huge animal that was obviously running in our general direction.  Oh god, it must be a bear.  Since we slept without the rain fly that night, I immediately popped my head up to see the upper part of a jogger bolt past us about 50 ft. from camp.  How one skinny jogger could make that much noise, I'll never know, but then again it could just have been my mind making me think every little sound a bear.  Later in the trip we actually would have a bear encounter in our camp.

After the bear/jogger, we walked out to the edge of the bluff to eat our breakfast with a huge 360 degree view.  After that we started making tracks for the morning.  While we were packing up, Allison had noticed that our liquid soap had leaked all over the hip strap support (near your butt) on the back of her bag.  Without a large amount of water at our disposal we just had to pack up and find the first water source where we could finally try to get rid of some of the soap.  Let me stop here for a quick trail etiquette lesson.  Even if your soap is biodegradable you should never wash anything with soap directly in any water source, as even biodegradable soap can get people and animals down stream sick. Anyway, a few miles later we got to the water source.  By this time the soap had irritated Allison's sweaty back and gotten all over her shirt and shorts.  Time for one of many couples bonding moments that you might only experience if you do through hiking and even then only when your soap gets rubbed into your back for a few hours.  Allison stripped off her pants and shirt in the middle of the trail, you lose all modesty a few days in, threw on her sweater (maybe not all modesty) and started washing her clothes and herself, but couldn't quite reach without getting her sweater all wet. I proceeded to do my manly duty which involved retrieving multiple 32 oz buckets from the stream, bringing them to Allison who was a safe distance away, and trying to wash the soap off her butt.

That evening we camped at edge of the meadow which had a dry spring.  This wasn't a problem because we had planned accordingly and carried extra water from a source several miles before camp.   At this camp we finished the first book of the trail..  The next morning Allison realized that we might be short on food because had been going a bit slower than planned.  No matter how well you plan, food shortages are a fact of life on the trail.  We learned pretty quickly that the faster you go, the less food you have to carry.  The food shortage ended up not being a big problem.  I think we skipped one meal and rationed out the rest of the food and snacks so we weren't miserable for the rest of the section.

As we started our uphill approach to highway 3 it started to get really hot.  This heat would change to thunderstorms and hail in a matter of hours, but more on that later.  As we continued to ascend, we ran into a notable phenomenon that neither of us had seen before, tons of frogs along the trail at 7200'.  The only thing I can guess is that we just walked through at the perfect time and during the fall-spring months it is probably much too cold at that elevation for them to survive.  During the beginning of summer most of the snow has melted so there is both fresh water and milder temperatures.  

After the frogs, we landed one of my favorite yet scariest campsites of the whole trip.  It was a semi exposed ridge with only a few trees and a great view of Shasta.  After setting up camp we found a spot out of the wind to cook and then ate dinner looking at the view in the top image of this post.  It was a pretty cool place to be.  As we sat eating our improvised "Taco Bell in a Bag" meal and enjoying the view with few clouds and blue skies, we had absolutely no idea what weather was in store for us in a few hours.

The beginning of our night was relaxing.  Then as night fell it began to rain.  Then the rain turned into a full on thunderstorm.  We were on the top of an exposed ridge and the thunder and lightning was getting closer and closer.  I was sure any second we were going to get fried like a mountain frog.  Allison and I held onto each other and counted the intervals between lightning and thunder to determine the distance of the storm.  According to one of our measurements, there was one lightning strike within a mile of our location.  Just when we thought it couldn't get any more interesting, it started to hail.  It was small at first but soon got larger.  Luckily it had been so windy up on the ridge when we were setting up camp that we decided to use eight `2"x`8" pieces of wood to stake down the tent and it held fast.  When we awoke in the morning much of the hail was still there.  We even found a few patches down the trail at 10 a.m. that were still the size of small marbles.

It got really cold that afternoon and started raining.  There were also tons of fallen trees over the trail which we had to navigate.  Multitudes of downed trees ended up being one of the banes of our existence in multiple sections of the hike.  The toll this exercise takes on your speed and morale is enormous.  As the day got increasingly nastier, we decided to call it a day and bushcamp for a short 11 mile day.

The next morning the weather seemed to be clearing, but there was still lots of fog.  The days hike contained lots of uphill through forests that had been completely obliterated by fire several years ago. These types of areas really look like another planet and remind you how powerful nature is.  Later in the day we ran into three north bound hikers, Magic Man, Bigfoot and Tin Tin.  They were coming from the Mexican border and thus already in good shape.  At the time they passed us they were doing 20-25 miles a day.  They wouldn't have been notable except that we were destined to run into all three of them in separate places later in our journey.

We were supposed to do 15 miles but only ended up doing 13.  We were wiped out and both my knee and foot were yelling at me to stop.  We found a nice flat campsite close to a stream and setup camp.  Earlier in the trip we had been having some trouble with our rain fly leaking.  Our solution was to put our emergency blanket between the tent and the rain fly.  While this sort of worked for rain, it was also really loud.  So, between being kept up a lot of the night and my knee and foot being injured, we decided to take a zero day.  Allison read almost all day as it was too cold to do anything outside of the tent.

In the morning it was partly cloudy but trying to clear up. For the last few weeks I had been having problems being to cold at night and this morning I finally gave in and determined I needed a warmer sleeping bag.   I can't say enough about REI's service.  This is why we almost exclusively buy our big ticket items from them.  Allison called REI from the top of the hill. The REI lady was really nice considering their system was crashing and shipped us a warmer sleeping bag to our next stop, fully refunded my used/stinky bag, honors our 20% percent discount and a gave Allison free shipping on a fathers day gift.  It costs you a little more to shop at REI, but they really treat you like their #1 customer everytime.  Later in the day we crossed over the road that leads to the town of Etna.  From here you can hitch a ride to resupply, but we decided we were going to be ok despite the food shortage.  The summit of the actual mountain is very pretty.  So pretty, in fact that we didn't notice that there was a 12.5 mile dry stretch, luckily we made it through just fine.