July 17, 2017
Mile 1050.8 to Mile 1077.5 (Mountains to my left, Tahoe to my right, but I can’t see it yet!)
Pacific Crest Trail Thru-Hike: Day 73
We did 27 miles today! We are 12.5 from hitching to Tahoe! Yeeee! I have no idea what the trail will be like tomorrow so I won’t get my hopes up, but we still have zero days on the 19th and 20th!
Yoav and Dean, our Israeli friends (yah! Friends now!) gave us oatmeal and ramen because I mentioned we would probably run out of food and be walking dry into Tahoe. He only convinced me to take the food (I’m Minnesotan, remember), by telling me the story of him and Dean heading dry into Sonora Pass. They ran out of food that day, so they wanted to make it to Sonora Pass before making camp. That means the giant, super-sketchy snow slope we came down on the way into Sonora Pass…they did at 10pm in the pitch dark. That’s the slope Alex had to self-arrest all the way down because it was too icy to glissade. Yoav said it sucks to be trying to make miles AND not have enough to eat. It does. He understood. So I took the food. Yoav also said the key to emergency food is have it be something you’d never choose to eat otherwise. These two things should do the trick: plain oatmeal and chicken-flavored Maruchen Ramen.
Yoav showed us his GoPro video of him glissading down the Whitney Portal. The video lasted for TWO MINUTES. It goes from him having fun to him screaming like a 3-year-old.
Yoav’s girlfriend is coming from Israel to walk with him from the 25th of July to the 17th of August, but I don’t think we’ll meet her because he’s going to skip ahead a bit with her to walk a prettier, nicer section of trail. Dean said he’ll be leaving the PCT when the girlfriend comes, and though he didn’t seem sad, I felt sad.
When we bumped into Yoav and Dean and had this long, wonderful encounter, we had been walking and I saw what I thought was a bunch of trash in a stream. It was actually unopened cans of soda being kept cold—trail magic!
The stars are beautiful and I am very hopeful for tomorrow.