When I opened my eyes this morning, we were in ground fog that was bitter cold.  There was ice all over our tarp! Brrrr!  I was on kitchen crew for much of today, starting at 6:30am with cutting bagels, then continuing on with work on scrambled eggs, followed by scraping and scrubbing very dirty egg pans! What a feast we had for breakfast! In the very cold morning, with ice on the tables, we served up all kinds of bagels with cream cheese, jams, peanut butter, and lots of fruit, plus all sorts of scrambled eggs with sausages, etc. I had fun talking to Georgi Heitman, the trail angel from Old Station.  She told me about their SCARY time last fall when a forest fire almost reached their house!

The pot-and-dishwashing side of being on breakfast crew is actually kind of fun!  We had a very jolly crew who joked and scrubbed diligently.  I was running around collecting MORE dirty stuff to wash, and every time I came up with an armful of messy whatevers, the crew would cheer, “Let’s go, guys!  Incoming!”  They were awesome!  I also took on the job of carrying the dirty dishwater off to the toilets to dump it in.  I made lots of trips with those buckets!  Last night after dinner, on one of my “dump the bucket runs”, I noticed a small crowd of hikers standing around near the row of portable toilets.  Thinking nothing of it, I opened one of the doors and went in with my bucket.  Oh my!  Sitting on top of the toilet was a large browncolored SNAKE!  My immediate reaction was that it must be a fake plastic snake that someone put there as a joke–but then it MOVED!  I said, “Hi, Mr. Snake!   OK, OK, I’m outta here!” and quickly backed out.  I heard a muffled “Aw, darn!” from the crowd of hikers.  Turned out that they were hanging about for the fun of watching people freak out when they found the snake, and I hadn’t been much fun to watch! 

Since ADZPCTKO doesn’t provide lunch, Bill and I took a stroll into town and enjoyed sharing a table with a couple of  other hikers. Then we went tearing back to camp just in time for seminars on mountaineering and snow travel, plus snow and water reports. The snow reports are very troubling. It’s continuing to snow up there, instead of melting! I am personally praying that the weather will warm up and clear up to take care of it.  Bill started talking about skipping the Sierras again and heading for Oregon instead, as we did in 2005,  but quickly changed his mind when we heard the report on OR/WA–they had tons of snow up there, too.  In 2005, there was a sort of drought and snow levels were low, so we were able to “skip up” and not hit many snow problems.  Not this year!  Georgi Heitman of Old Station was going around literally begging hikers, “PLEASE don’t even THINK about skipping up to Northern CA to avoid the Sierra snow!  We are up to our eyeballs in snow–it’s BAD!”. So Bill and I resolved we’d just “go for it” and see what happens.  If it gets really tough, we can always bail out. We also learned about TWO major detours up ahead in Southern CA–both due to fires last fall. 

In the afternoon, we also had a great time meeting the Rosanders, who have offered to help us in Tehachapi, plus other people from Sonoma County. We got our 2010 “class picture” at the rocks by the lake. Our 2010 class is the largest one yet! At the gear contest, I entered my lightweight, hands-free umbrella holder and tied for 6th place out of 13 contestants. Not bad! Then I was put in charge of the kitchen dishwash crew for dinner, which was another feast of all sorts of hamburgers and all the fixings, potato salad, cabbage salad, fruit salad and brownies. (By the way, I think brownies should be classified as the Official Dessert of the PCT–everywhere we went along the trail, we found brownies at every trail angel’s house! )

 The first item on the evening program was a slide presentation of the first thru-RIDE of the PCT in 1959 by a husband and wife team. She’s 84 now, sharp as a tack and a wonderful lady!  Eric Ryback, the first “official” PCT thruHIKER was there, too.  We enjoyed the presentation, but both Bill and I were really tired and headed for bed after that.  We didn’t get much sleep last night because our campsite mates stayed up so late talking and making noise.  They were having fun, which was great, but I was up so early this morning that I ended up short on sleep.  So we missed seeing the “premiere” of the new National Geographic film about the PCT.  I am not a National Geographic fan–they so misrepresent things in many fields of science and history that I no longer look at any of their stuff.   Their “PCT film” was typical–it exaggerated and misrepresented what the PCT is really like.  We began to hear shouts from the hikers who were watching the film.  They were yelling “Extreme!  Extreme!” in a mocking way.  (In the morning, I asked some folks what they were yelling about, and they said it was because the film narrator kept using the term “extreme” so often that they got disgusted and started yelling every time he said it again!)

It felt good to lie down and rest after a busy day.  And it was so nice to see sunshine and be warm again!  Tomorrow we will head for Canada!