Last night I got one of my best sleeps on trail. It was really warm, so I could actually stretch out instead of curling up in a ball inside my sleeping bag.
After the good night of sleep I was ready to start the day with a climb. We started with a nice 600 foot warm up climb, followed by an over 3000 foot climb. By about 10 in the morning, I had already climbed more than I did in the previous day, where I hiked 32 miles.
Most of the pictures I take are the epic views, but a lot of the time in Nor Cal, I’m just hiking through the woods.
After all that climbing, we followed a ridge and got some beautiful views of some big lakes. I wish we would actually walk by those lakes.
Originally, we had planned on getting into a town/resort called Belden today. It would have been a 37 mile day with almost 8000 feet of gain, followed by a brutally steep 5000 foot descent. When we realized that, we decided on a campsite just on the downslope, around 31 miles out.
It didn’t help that today was brutally hot. We crossed a fairly busy road today, so most of the hikers were taking a break there in hopes of trail magic. We all sat in a row, under the shade of a sign, looking like hobos. I haven’t done that since the desert.
Our campsite even kinda looks like the desert. We’re out of the trees and in scrubby bushes, not unlike the ones in the desert. Lizards are running around and we don’t have a stream next to our camp.
I’m dealing with a lot of the same problems I had at the beginning of the hike too. Sore shoulders, aching feet, and annoyingly, blisters. I got a nice big one on my pinky toe today and had to pop it while I was taking a water break.
Despite all that, Northern California is pretty great. Bigger climbs means better views, more bugs means more water. We were spoiled in the Sierra having running water literally every hundred yards. Now we only have a few miles. We had sections in the desert that were almost 30 miles. We still have a lot of California left, but it’s exciting. We saw our first volcano today, a sign that we’re entering the Cascades.