PCT – KM to TM Section Hike – Day 5

Daily Miles: 17

Total Miles: 81

Good night sleeping for all of us last night as hoped. It was quite cool and moist – Mace’s tent and our tarps had quite a bit of moisture on them from being so close to the stream…not our favorite kind of camp spot, but it was the mile marker we wanted to be at the end of the day.

Got going at our normal time around six and had a beautiful morning that didn’t get too warm. Early in the day we passed Bighorn Plateau, which is a massive, beautiful expanse that stands out to us on each visit to the high Sierra.

The big task for the day was getting over Forester Pass. Yesterday, we had a thunderstorm around to 3 o’clock and the forecast had previously said that there was thunderstorms around that time for today. However, we used the Garmin InReach to get an update and found that the thunderstorms had gotten pushed out till 5 o’clock so we figured we’d go for it if it looked reasonable as we approached the pass.

It did look good as we left lunch. We had mostly clear skies with only a few clouds building around the mountains in the area. Forrester has quite a long approach leading up to the pass…and once there, it feels almost wall-like. Quite a feet of trail-building on this pass.

There was a bit of cloud cover as we went up the pass and as we started into the switchbacks only a little bit of rumbling from the clouds, so we just continued to push on. There were a few folks who had camped right below the pass at the bottom – which we didn’t want to do nor did it make sense to camp there as it was also exposed.

After a couple minutes on the pass we started the long decent. There was a bit of rain and wind but nothing too substantial. The most challenging part of the descent was all of the rocks…some sections had a lot of small rocks, like the size of a small fist. These started to hurt our feet after stepping on them for a thousand+ steps.

We are camped at a nice campsite with excellent views. It’s not a campsite that was in the trail app and doesn’t really look like it get used as one, but it was the first spot we could find that had good trees and a spot for Mace’s tent.