PCT 89 - Beyond Hyatt Lake - Long Distance Hiker

Daily Miles: 23
Total Miles: 1753

We keep waking up a bit later and later each day. We just naturally wake up when the sun rises, but as it gets light later, that means we get a later start. Two months ago, we were waking up a bit after 5:00, but now we are waking up around 5:45. We’ll see if we need to start setting our alarms soon.

The morning was quite warm and we had a bit of a climb at the beginning. The climbs lately are fairly mild and seem to pass quickly which is nice.

Beardoh got stung by a bee as we were walking this morning. It seems strange to us that we have all gotten stung while just walking on the trail, presumably not bothering the bees. Later in the morning, Beardoh and MountainMan walked over a hornet’s nest in the trail and both got multiple stings. SweetPea was walking a bit behind (to avoid the dust kicked up by the guys in front of her since the trail is SO dusty), so she was able to stop when she realized the hornets were ahead and walk around them to avoid getting bit. The stings were still bothering Beardoh and MountainMan at the end of the day.

We passed more bushes of thimble berries along the trail today. Whenever we came to a patch with ripe berries, we stopped and ate all the ripe ones we could find. The berries are so fragile, they practically get mushed just by us picking them, but they are so tasty.

We got to camp pretty early today (5:40pm). We are camped near a really nice spring and we headed straight there when we arrived. We were all out of water and quite thirsty, so MountainMan filtered some water and we all drank at least a liter.

The trail seemed very quiet today. We saw a few section hikers and only three thru hikers. The thru hikers we only saw once we were in camp for the evening. It is pretty strange how some days we see a lot of hikers and other days we see so few. It was a nice change of pace to have the trail mostly to ourselves today.