PCT 44 – Selden Pass

Daily Miles: 22
Total Miles: 875

Happy Birthday to SweetPea!  

We both had a good night of sleep with the warmer temperatures from being at a lower elevation.  

The beginning of the day started very mild, with some flat walking along the side of the river we had camped next to.  The river was so full of water, it was quite loud and aggressive.

We were able to cross over all the morning streams by rock hopping or crossing on logs.  It was nice to have dry feet for that time, as things went in the opposite direction after lunch.

The late morning was spent hiking up to Seldon Pass.  We had expected not to encounter any more snow on the passes, but we had snow for the final quarter to half mile of the ascent.  We were annoyed simply because we had it in our minds that we wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.

We ate lunch at the pass and then headed down. The snow continued on the other side for at least a mile.  It was slushy and soft, which made for very slippery walking.  As we continued down, we encountered a lot of swollen streams we needed to ford in addition to a lot of water in the trail.  We decided we would just walk through it all with our shoes.

When we got close to Bear Creek, we could hear the force of the water.  It was definitely something we needed to ford, but the current seemed very strong and the water looked deep.  As a group, we decided to link arms in a chain and go across together.  That way if someone slipped, they wouldn’t get swept away with the water.  Once we all got safely across we felt it had been a good choice to go across together because the water was too strong for some of the smaller people in our group to have made it safely across alone.

We took a break on the other side of the river to dry things out a bit, but that proved to be just wishful thinking.  The rest of our afternoon turned out to have countless more fords, some with quite a strong current. Each time we came to another ford, we would just look at each other incredulously, because we couldn’t believe how many there were!  Our feet have not been so continuously wet in quite a few years.

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We ended the day with a big climb.  We figured it would be best to get the climb out of the way this evening instead of tomorrow morning.  We finally got to camp at 7:20pm and we are all exhausted.  We definitely didn’t think today would be as hard and as long as it was.

The mosquitos we pretty bad in sections of today’s hike.  We even broke out the DEET for the first time. The mosquitos are pretty bad here at camp, so everyone ate dinner in their own tents (or hammocks in our case). That made for a quiet evening.

We are excited for a short day tomorrow into VVR. We will get a chance to relax and eat…definitely our biggest priorities right now.  The past five days have been really exhausting and draining. We definitely need a break to re-energize.