Last summer Fixit and I did the whole Tahoe Rim Trail by starting at Mt. Rose Summit, and resupplied at the halfway point, which was the Echo Lake resort post office.  We’d resupplied there both times we did the PCT, and had found the owners to be very friendly and helpful.  They even let us pick up our box outside of the posted post office hours and were cheerful and accommodating.

Not anymore.

Same owners–but their ATTITUDE toward hikers has totally changed.  And that’s because of two things:  the unbelievable hordes of people now hiking the PCT, and most of all, the rotten ATTITUDES of many of those hikers.  Instead of cheerful store owners at Echo Lake, we found them morphed into angry, growly and not accommodating at all.  We had to sit and wait over 2 hours before we could drop off our Rim Trail supply box, and then when we’d hiked around the lake and had arrived to pick up the box, we had to wait over three hours before they would let us have it.  And we had to endure them growling and snarling at us.  But under all the snarls and growls, we heard loud and clear their total frustration with the hikers.  Seems that an awful lot of people were coming in off the trail and proceeding to get drunk and disorderly and were leaving messes and annoying regular customers and in general being very obnoxious.

Attitude.   It’s seriously important when you thruhike.

For one thing, there is no way you are going to finish a 2,000 plus mile hike unless you have the right attitude.  Francis Tapon (one awesome hiker!) did a survey/study to figure out “What’s the key factor that determines whether a hiker will be able to finish the PCT/CDT/AT?”   Is it being younger?  No–lots of old guys finish.  Is it being fit & healthy?  No–people with medical issues do finish.  Is it having new gear?   No–people finish with all kinds of gear.  Is it better food?  No, people finish even eating junk, and whatever they can scrounge from hiker boxes.  Is it having plenty of money?  No, people finish who have very little money.  What it turned out is that being able to finish is all about your ATTITUDE and determination to finish.

Fixit and I think this is funny, sort of.   Here’s how we see it:   Starting the PCT/CDT/AT, you have to be a little bit unusual.  To keep going, you have to become a bit crazy.  And to finish, you have to be a bit insane!  You have to be able to laugh at things that would normally make you cry.  Add to your vocabulary the phrase, “Are we having fun yet?  Yeah!”   so you can yell it whenever things get really tough.

And attitude becomes REALLY important when you get into a resupply.  Every hiker in a way represents the entire hiker community.  We try to represent it well, and that means having a cheerful, friendly, respectful attitude when we are in town, and not leaving messes and getting drunk & disorderly and obnoxious.   We want those little mountain towns and resorts to be GLAD the hikers are coming through, not resentful and defensive.

From what we hear of the CDT, it is a real test for attitude–lots harder than the PCT.   Hopefully, we will pass the test.

Fixit and I were looking at the Postholer chart of snow levels in Colorado–appears it was a more or less average year up there on the Divide.  And it isn’t just the snow that concerns us a bit (like “should we mail ourselves some snowshoes??”) We were also thinking about the ALTITUDE.  Being 76 and 68 years old means that like it or not, we DO have to think about altitude and how it will affect us.

When we did the PCT in 2005 and 2010, we happily hiked over Forester Pass and all the other high passes with nothing more than extra huffing and puffing.  The altitude was not a problem.  Then for the next 2 years, we climbed Whitney every year and Fixit did the whole John Muir Trail, again with nothing worse than huff ‘n puff.

But in 2013, all that changed.  We were doing our annual “climb Whitney/do the JMT”.  As usual, we parked our car at Horseshoe Meadows, hiked up to Cottonwood Pass, camped along the way, and the next day reached our “base camp” on the next “level” down from Guitar Lake.  (The reason we use that location for base camp is that it’s outside the “no poop zone” where you are required to carry a wag bag.  If you camp at Guitar Lake, you’d better not be digging catholes, or you are BAD!!)  At dinnertime that night (no cook, of course–we don’t like bears visiting at night) we found we just were not hungry.  Strange.  Even stranger, all during that night, though I was lying down, I found my heart was pounding as if I’d just climbed a steep hill.  It was weird and I worried a bit about “what is happening to me?”

Next morning, dark and early at 5:00 am, we got up to eat breakfast and start the Whitney climb.  To our surprise, neither of us could face eating anything.  I managed to force myself to eat a bit, but had to choke it down.  We packed up camp, left our packs hidden in a group of stunted trees, and began heading up.  Fixit of course was soon far ahead of me.  The higher I went, the sicker I felt.  Pretty soon I thought I was going to “lose my cookies” and had to stop and sit by the trail, fighting against the nausea.  I knew then what was going on.  “Altitude sickness!  This totally sucks!”  But I did not have a headache or any really scary symptoms so I was determined to push on, and I did, all the way to the top, but way more slowly due to having to stop every now and then from feeling so nauseous.  I met Fixit as he came down, and he was looking a bit green, too, but determined to begin his journey to Yosemite Valley on the JMT.  At the top of Whitney, I felt so sick that all I could do was sign the register, look around a bit, and head down.

On the hike back to our car, though I slowly felt a bit better, I still basically couldn’t eat.  But when I reached Cottonwood Pass and the turn down to Horseshoe Meadows, the magic began.  As I went down, down the switchbacks, I felt better and better.  When I reached the flatlands of the Meadows, the nausea was totally gone and I was hungry!  What a wonderful feeling!  And at the trailhead, TRAIL MAGIC!!  A group of PCT thruhikers were there–they had just come from a zero in Lone Pine and were having a little picnic before heading back up to the PCT.   I yelled, “Hey, hikertrash!  How’s it going?” and ended up having a beer and sharing trail tales with them.

So….the CDT in Colorado spends a lot of time at altitude.  Serious altitude.  Fixit and I are wondering how it’s going to work out.  We have solved our Mt. Whitney altitude problem by taking 3 extra days of just resting at around 11,000 plus feet, drinking lots of water and eating lots of carbs before continuing on.  But on the CDT, what will we do?  Our tentative plan at this point is to hang out at Cumbres Pass for at least a couple of days.  That’s up pretty high, and we’d have the fun of watching trains go by.   I am a total sucker for trains–love them!   On the PCT, I was in heaven at Cajon Pass, with all the trains!   Anyway, we will see how we feel.  I’ve learned my own “early warning system” for altitude sickness–heart pounding even when I’m resting, and not feeling hungry  when I should be hungry.

Hopefully all will be OK, and if we really start feeling altitude sickness, the cure is so easy–just head downhill!

We spent the day yesterday hiking the Bolinas Ridge Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore.  It’s our next-to-last big training hike before we head out for the CDT, and we figured it had at least some CDT features:  cows, mud, big hills, wind and wildflowers.

From what we’ve read of CDT hiker blogs, sounds like cows are everywhere on the CDT–just like on Bolinas Ridge.  The cows on the Ridge are mostly Black Angus, and they are totally blasé about hikers coming by.  “Oh, more hikers…yawn…go back to chewing cud.”  One time we were up there and the cows were hanging out in a large group right on the trail, totally blocking it.  Huddled in a nervous group some distance from them was a group of dayhikers, obviously wanting to follow the trail, but scared of the cows.  Fixit and I pay cows no mind, and we just marched past the trembling dayhikers, right at the cows, who of course politely (only a few tossed heads and snorts) moved out of the way.  Now mind you, if there had been a bull around, we wouldn’t have done that, but there was no bull in sight.  Actually, yesterday, we did see a bull, but he was behind one of the fences.  Whew.  They are big guys and we would not mess with one of THEM.

Mud…the Bolinas Ridge has a number of mudhole stretches, but yesterday they weren’t too bad.  We stopped and looked at one of the biggest puddles and joked, “So that’s what the water looks like on the CDT?  Oh, fun!”    But we are seriously thinking about how to deal with CDT water.  It’s going to be Aqua Mira, but we may need to strain things first.  We are deciding what to bring for that.

Bolinas Ridge is also a great trail for practicing lots of ups and downs.  It’s more ups going out, then more downs coming back, but plenty of rollercoaster inbetween.  Back when we were first training for the PCT in 2005, we found that hills were really rough on our knees.  I’d come home and owww, my knees were sore for a couple of days after a big hill hike.  Once we got ON the PCT, it just got worse.  By Warner Springs, my right knee especially was really hurting.  I mentioned this to Anna, a fellow thruhiker, and she said, “Oh, I can fix that!   Here, you can have one of my patella straps.  I’m actually doing fine–I can manage without it.  You can get your own at Big Bear City, and give me mine back.”  Bingo–with a patella strap in place under my kneecap, the pain vanished.  And yes, I did get my own at Big Bear, and returned Anna’s with much thanks!  Eventually I found that my knees became so strong, I didn’t need the patella strap anymore, and now, though I still have a pair of them, I never use them.  Yesterday even carrying a heavy training pack and doing lots of hills, I was fine.

Wind–from what I hear, the CDT can be very windy.  OK–we had plenty of that yesterday, too–cold, cold wind that was enough to make us stagger a bit.  We were joking about it, “OK, on the scale of PCT winds–would this be Tehachapi Pass level (the worst), or Sonora Pass approach (2nd worst) or Cajon Pass approach (3rd worst) or San Gorgonio Pass (4th worst)?”  We finally decided on Sonora Pass, since the wind there was so COLD, just like the one we were in.  Brrrrr!

Lastly, wildflowers.  Yes!   Up on Bolinas Ridge, since it is very windy, the flowers grow low to the ground, but they were everywhere, like a carpet of green interwoven with yellow, gold, pink, blue…….  And then when we were in the woodsy sections, there were woods wildflowers like douglas iris in the sunnier spots, dainty white milkmaids, trout lily and others.   I am looking forward to seeing what the wildflowers will be on the CDT!

Then we came home, showered, ate and tackled MORE packing of resupply boxes!   The countdown has begun!

It’s beginning to sink in amongst our friends that we really are about to disappear into the middle of nowhere for several months.  Their reactions are always interesting, but not very varied.  It’s either, “Wow, awesome, I would SO like to do that (hike the CDT)!” or  “No way would I ever do that”  or just “Why?”  They all say they will miss us.  And we will miss them, too.

But other than friends,  what do Fixit and I REALLY miss when we are on a thruhike?  Actually, not a whole lot.

We miss having convenient, easy-to-obtain WATER.  Wouldn’t it be nice if the PCT and CDT had a water faucet every few miles?  If you’ve done the PCT, you will remember the water faucet at Snow Canyon, after you just came down 5,000 waterless feet and countless miles of switchbacks in the heat.  Nice!   But that’s not how it is everywhere else.  Every night I spend time stretched out in my sleeping bag studying the “water situation” for the next day and making plans.  And then there is the fun of carrying heavy liters of water.  And the uneasiness of wondering, “Did the water I just drank have any creepy-crawlies in it?”  So one thing Fixit and I miss very much is water faucets, but we don’t miss them enough to make us give up thruhiking!

The other thing we miss is  TALKING about God with people.  There are few opportunities on the trail for going to church.  Bummer.  But we do have each other, and hey, we can talk to God Himself anytime, anyhow, anyway.

Maybe it’s way down on the scale of things I personally miss, but it is there– is my garden.  I pretty much grow all the veges and a lot of the fruit we eat, and I love flowers, too.  The wildflowers on the trail are wonderful and I enjoy them immensely, but I’m also a sucker for roses and garden flowers.  The first time we did the PCT in 2005, it had been a very wet winter, and the southern California wildflowers were amazing.  But when we finished up our first 100 miles and arrived in Warner Springs….there was a ROSE garden!!!  Poor Fixit had to wait patiently while I got my “rose fix”!

So that’s pretty much what we will miss–water faucets, God-talk and for me, gardens.  And our friends.

Thruhikers come in lots of kinds! There are those who prep everything, those who prep some things,  and those who wing it.    The preppers (like me) want to get EVERY last little thing ready ahead of time, pack it in boxes and have the boxes mailed to them along the trail so they can just open the box, put the stuff in their pack and go.

The wingers would rather just toss some stuff in their pack and hit the trail, stopping in town occasionally to check the hiker boxes and see what they can find, supplementing with stuff from a store.

The sectionpreppers will prepare everything they need for the first part of the trail, mail those boxes, and then at some point they have to stop and do a bunch of shopping, box it up and send the boxes to their next few resupplies.

The reason I like being a prepper is that when I get into town, I want to just kick back and relax.  I do NOT like shopping, and I do not trust in what I might find in some little fisherman store along the trail.  I do believe that as hikers, we represent the CDT or PCT or whatever trail we are on, and we should make local people glad rather than annoyed, that we came to their little town.  So we make a point of eating in local restaurants and I do buy a lunch and some snacks for the trail before we leave.

Being a prepper does involve an awful lot of work before we leave.  I spent half the day yesterday “collating” our dinners for the entire CDT.  That means into a plastic vege bag I put a freezedried dinner or Knorr side, a snack bag of extra veges, a snack bag of extra meat, a snack bag of extra carbs (noodles or rice) and a snack bag of cookies.  That is one dinner.  Then it gets mushed and sqooshed till it occupies the least space possible, and then tied off and labeled as to which box it goes in.  Sometimes I also remove the freezedried dinners from their packaging and put them into something lighter and smaller.  We do not need those big thick freezedried dinner bags, since we do not cook in the bag.   I know some hikers make their own freezedried dinners, but I just don’t have time to do that.

It is tedious to do all the collating, but at the same time it is fun to think about the day when we will actually walk into the towns where the various boxes are going.  And the many bags and boxes of stuff that have been sitting in our living room are gradually going away and the contents being put into their shipping boxes in the garage.  I will be glad when it is all done!

Looking over Jackie “Yogi” McDonnell’s CDT guide, I got a good laugh out of what she said about “Hiking as a Couple.”  Yes, for sure, guys and gals hike differently!  Fixit and I are no exception.

Fixit’s idea of preparing for a hike is to toss some food in a pack and take off.  He likes to hike fast, from point A to point B.  He just puts his head down and goes, and as a result sometimes misses a turnoff.  Rough trail does not slow him down–he is very surefooted. Occasionally he will stop and look at a very awesome view, but only sometimes.  He is fine with hiking by headlamp at night in order to get more miles.  Food is irrelevant to him–he eats simply to get some calories then gets going again.  When faced with an expanse of snow on a steep hillside or a steep climb up a snow face, his motto is “Momentum trumps gravity” and he races across (or up).  He crosses rivers by walking across logs. At a resupply town, he would like to just get our box from the PO, eat a big town meal, then hit the trail again.  He likes to stay clean by literally jumping into a convenient lake, clothes and all and swimming around a bit.

I (3rd Monty) have a whole different approach.  My preparation is very detailed and involves lots of lists and measuring and making endless baggies of this and that to eat and organizing everything very carefully.  I can hike fast on nice even trail, but the minute it gets rocky/rooty, I have to slow down because I’m such a klutz that I’d be doing one faceplant after another, even with trek poles.  I love to look at scenery and take pictures of flowers, and I’m  the one who spots the turnoffs and yells, “BILL!   Come back!   We turn off here!”   I do not like hiking by headlamp unless it’s early morning and getting lighter.  Food is important to me.  I like it to be tasty, and I like to find a place with a view to stop and eat, even if it’s just a Snickers.  Snow fields and faces are scary for me.  I put on the Microspikes, get out my ice axe and proceed with great caution.  If I can’t ford a river, I CRAWL across a log.  When we get to town, I really like being able to get a room, wash clothes in a washing machine and wash myself in a shower.  And sleep in a bed for one night.  And eat a lot.

So how can we possibly hike together?  I will never forget an encounter we had while on the PCT in Washington state in 2010.  We met a couple who were out dayhiking (they were headed back to their car) and they said, “You guys look like you’ve come a long way (yeah, we did look like hikertrash all right!)–where did you start from?”   We said, “Mexico.  We’re doing the Pacific Crest Trail.”  The dayhikers stared in open incredulity and finally the gal said, “And you’re still together?  That’s amazing.”    Back in southern California on the PCT that same year, we were happily hiking along the trail when we met another northbound thruhiker named Transient, who’d stopped for a rest.  Transient was known for his blunt but wise philosophical sayings.  And this was no exception.  He said to Fixit, “So, how did you get a woman to follow you and do this trail?”

Fixit’s reply was, “God gave her to me.”   And then he said a bunch of nice things about me (which I totally don’t deserve) and about how God is really real and changed his life.  Transient said, “Aaa, I tried that God stuff.  Didn’t work for me.”  He and Fixit talked some more and I think Transient may have moved over at least a bit in his thinking.

But as Jackie McDonnell said in her guidebook, the bottom line is…..GUYS love their gals and are willing to make LOTS of changes so that we can hike together.  When compromises are made, it’s pretty much always the guy conceding to the gal, because they love us.  Fixit is very, very patient with me.  When I’m slow on rough trail, he stops and waits.  When I take forever crossing a snow field, he waits patiently on the other side.  When it’s time to eat and I get picky about looking for a place with a view, he doesn’t complain.  He doesn’t grump about having to pay for a motel in town.

Once a year he does the whole John Muir Trail, HIS way–I go with him to the top of Mt. Whitney and say, “Bye, Bill, have fun!” and off he goes, totally hiking in his own way and having a blast, I am sure!

So gals, we sure can be grateful for the guys who love us and want to be together.  They put up with WAY more than we do!

I spent a number of years as a costume maker and wardrobe mistress in the ballet world, where the dancers sometimes  refer to each other as “bunheads.”  When we were on the PCT both in 2005 and 2010, we noticed that most of us thruhikers at some point or other turn into GEAR heads.  I will never forget sitting on the big granite slab by Lake Edison, waiting for the VVR ferry to arrive, and it wasn’t long before the PCT and JMT hikers were taking gear out of their packs and comparing who had what and the merits of each.  When we meet nonhikers, they want to hear “trail tales” and could care less about our gear.

I am way too busy right now to make a spreadsheet of all our gear and how much it weighs down to the hundreths of an ounce.  But here are the basics:

BIG STUFF   Tent (duplex), Packs and Sleeping bags all from ZPacks.  Normally we use either a tarp or we cowboy camp.  But the CDT sounded like we should bring a tent, so we are.  We tried it on the Tahoe Rim Trail and it was fine (though I admit I prefer a tarp).  Packs–I love my old tried ‘n true, but ZPacks it will be, for saving weight.

WATER    Aqua Mira.  We tried the Sawyer Squeeze and it is tedious beyond belief.  We would rather hike than filter!  We tried it as an inline filter and about sucked our tongues out trying to get enough water flow. So where the water looks iffy, it will be Aqua Mira.  For carrying water, we each have a 3 liter Platypus, a 2 liter Platypus, and a 1 liter water bottle.

FOOD:  Pretty standard stuff.  Breakfast is granola, freezedried fruit, nuts, powdered milk, Belvita and Nutella.  We cook and eat dinner at noon, which gives us a midday rest and a chance to air our sleeping bags in the sun.  And, if any 4 legged critters smell our cooking, we are long gone by the time they arrive.  Dinner is freezedried stuff/Knorr with dried veges (from our garden!!!), added palm oil and finally cookies.  Supper is crackers and cheese or freezedried refried beans and dried fruit and more Nutella.  Snacks:  Snickers!

COOKING:  Esbit stove from ZPacks.  We used to use our tiny homemade liquid alcohol stove, which was great, but more and more wilderness areas now forbid liquid alcohol stoves.  We tried a propane canister and it’s too bulky and a hassle.

SHOES:  La Sportiva Ultra Raptor for both Fixit and I.   Great rock protection, excellent traction, very comfortable and tough.   THANK YOU to  Lady on a Rock (Rockin) for her blog on finishing the PCT last summer–La Sportiva shoes worked for her!  I used to always wear Vasque, but the Vasque shoes made now just do not work for me anymore.

CLOTHING:  I pretty much sew all our hike clothing and raingear using fabric I get from The Rain Shed in Albany, Oregon.  We wear long sleeved shirts and long pants (they are blue, by the way–if you see us on the trail, we are the couple with the blue pants) and I like the Sunday Afternoon hat.  We have down jackets from Mountain Hardware.  I made warm hoods and mittens, and we each have a longsleeved “polyphew”.

CAMERA:  I suppose we could use our phone, but we each carry a camera.  Fixit has a 2 AA battery camera (which is what we normally always use) but I am bringing a LI rechargeable battery camera as an experiment.  We will see how well it works out on a thru hike.  There are no places to recharge out in the middle of nowhere!

So that’s the basic stuff.  Of course there’s  little bitty things, too.  But right now I have to go work on putting supper stuff together.  Fixit is off where he always goes every Sunday afternoon–to Probation Camp, which is part of the juvenile justice system in our county.  The teen boys there are guys who ran with the gangs and got in trouble with the law.  At Probation Camp they have an awesome, outstanding program for helping those boys get their GED and learn a trade so that when they get out, they are ready for a job and hopefully will stay out of the gangs and out of trouble.  Every Sunday, Fixit and a friend of his go and sit on the porch to have a Bible discussion with any of the boys who are interested.  The basic format is “So, what do you think?  Got questions about God and stuff?” and it goes from there.  Fixit loves it!   Answering the boys’ questions is something he really enjoys.

Back in 2005, when we were total newbies at thruhiking, we thought that the most important thing to work on when training for a long hike was to do MILES–lots of miles.  At that point in time, we thought it was a big deal to do 15 miles in a day.  So we did our best to do hikes that were at least…gasp…12 to 15 miles long.  Sometimes we even pushed to 20 miles.  I will never forget one late afternoon when we’d been hiking all day in Sugarloaf State Park near Sonoma, and we were totally wasted because of all the hills, even though we were only carrying lunch and water in a daypack.  We were collapsed under a tree to rest, but still determined to get in a couple more miles, and I naively said, “The PCT couldn’t possibly be THIS tough.”   Boy, was I in for a shock.  It was WAY tougher.  Especially on feet.  Fixit had endless problems with his feet all the way from Mexico to Canada that year.  But we kept going anyway–it took us 5 months, and the first snows had arrived by the time we finished in October.

In 2010, we said, “Now we know better!” and  trained with WEIGHT, carrying our PACKS.  Turns out that mileage, though helpful, is not as important as weight.  That approach plus custom orthotics worked great–I for one was able to hike the whole PCT without any blisters or foot pain at all (except for the lava walking north of the Sisters in Oregon–owwww!)   The other aspect of training we learned was to hike on HILLS as much as possible.  And rough trail is good, too.

This time, we started training way early.  Back in April of 2015, we began to carry more weight, even in dayhikes. In June we climbed Mt. Whitney (entering from Cottonwood Pass) and Fixit set his new personal record for the John Muir Trail (7 days and 11 hours, not bad for a 75-year-old!).  After that, we continued to slowly add more weight, then did the Tahoe Rim Trail in August (in 7 1/2 days, not bad for a 75 & 67 year old).  Since then, we’ve been being as diligent as we can, building weight till we routinely carry at least 20 pounds, and aiming for around 30 miles a week, part of which comes from an all-day hike.  And now we’re a year older, too, so when we start at Crazy Cook, we will be 76 and 68 years old.  All the more reason to seriously train!

We live in the  North Bay area of San Francisco Bay,  and that means we have awesome choices for hiking.  This is a hikers’ paradise–our favorite trails are in Point Reyes National Seashore, Annadel State Park, Austin Creek Redwoods State Park and Lake Sonoma.  All of them have lots of big hills and plenty of rough trail.   That’s where we go when we are doing an all day hike.  On short days, we take a couple of hours to hike at Helen Putnam Regional Park, west of Petaluma, where there are big hills and some rough/muddy trail.  A couple of weeks ago, I was training in Helen Putnam Park, and met 4 forest firefighters who were wearing all their protective clothing, and carrying a bunch of gear.  They looked at me with my pack and said, “Looks like you’re training for something!”  I said, “Yup!  The Continental Divide Trail–New Mexico to Montana.  Looks like you’re training, too!”  They said they were, and headed for what’s locally known as “The Face”, a very steep bald hillside.  I had just finished climbing The Face twice, and was aiming at another hill, but I looked back to see how they were doing.   Plod, plod–all that firefighter stuff is heavy!  And it was a slightly ominous reminder of fire season–in 2010 we had to go around 10 miles of the PCT in Oregon because of a forest fire.  It reminded me to pray for the guys and gals who willingly go out to face the danger of firefighting so that the rest of us can be safe.

So training for us is:  carry weight and look for nice big steep hills and rough trail.  And on non-hike days, I do exercises to strengthen my core as well, plus stretches.  It takes time and tiredness…but right now, it feels so good to feel so strong.

Yesterday was our weekly “big hike” day, when we load up our packs and head out for the whole day.  We do shorter hikes on two other days, but Thursdays we try to replicate “the real deal” and hike all day.

We went for one of our favorite hilly hikes out at Point Reyes National Seashore, where there are plenty of great killer hills to climb, with the bonus of awesome chances to get a “view of the blue”–the Pacific Ocean far below.  It was windy and cloudy when we left the trailhead parking area at Bear Valley and headed right up the first climb–2 miles to the top of Mt. Wittenberg.  I was carrying my new Z-packs pack, which I modified quite a bit by adding more net pockets to the sides.  I love net pockets.  I can stow all kinds of stuff and find it easily without having to open the main pack.

At the top, bummer.  No view of the blue–just cloudy, gray and brrrr, cold wind.  We couldn’t even see the ocean at all.  Oh well–we headed on through Sky Camp and then waaaay down to the road, followed by a rollercoaster contour for 3 miles or so along the hillsides.  But then, wow!   There WAS a “view of the blue” only it wasn’t the ocean.  It was whole hillsides covered with the blue flowers of ceanothus (wild CA lilac) in full bloom.   I stopped in my tracks to take it all in.  The trail was dusted with tiny blue petals and the air was sweet with the perfume of the flowers.  So I did get a view of the blue after all–not waves on the ocean, but waves of flowers on the hills.  Works for me!

After climbing Point Reyes Hill and down the other side, then up and along Mt. Vision, we stopped for lunch in wind so strong and cold that we ended up having to hunker down while we ate instead of sitting up on a bare spot to enjoy the view.  The clouds did lift enough for us to see the ocean–the line of white at the beach was pretty sizeable, which meant that there were some big waves coming in.

We returned the same way we came, and got home tired and happy.  My new Zpacks pack worked just fine, and it is a lot lighter than my  good old tried ‘n true small aluminum external frame pack.  Now for more CDT logistics–there’s still food to measure and bag up!

We greatly admire the hikers who’ve earned the Triple Crown of AT, PCT and CDT thruhikes!  That makes 3 long hikes.  Well, if we can finish the CDT, that makes 3 long hikes for us, so it’s sortakinda a Triple Crown.  Sort of.

We did go have a look at the AT in Massachusetts.  Our impression was “This is a walk in the woods.  No views unless you happen to make it up to the top of something.”  We met some northbound AT thruhikers while we were there and we asked them, “Is this pretty typical AT trail?  Just walking through a forest?  No views, no nothing?”

They all sort of looked at the ground and shuffled their feet and finally one of them admitted, “Yeah, this is pretty typical.”  Another piped up, “Except back in Georgia before the trees leafed out.  We saw some good views then.”  So we brandished our PCT bandannas and told them, “Next time, go do a REAL trail!   The PCT is WAY better than this!”  They all said that was definitely something they planned to do.

We made up our minds at that point that doing the AT is something you only do so you can say you did it.  Not worth it.

Our first PCT hike was in 2005.  I  (3rd Monty) was 57 and Fixit was 65.  He had just retired and we figured, “This is our one and only chance to do the PCT before we are too old and decrepit.”  Wrong!   Doing the PCT got us into such great shape that we decided we had to do it again.  So in 2010, we did.   And now every summer, Fixit hikes the whole JMT–We start at Horseshoe Meadows and go up via Cottonwood Pass, so we don’t have to deal with permit hassles.  I go with Fixit to the top of Mt. Whitney, then say, “Bye, honey, have fun!” and I head back to the car, many miles away, while Fixit begins his race against time.  Each year he tries to go faster than he did the year before.  This summer of 2015, he did the whole JMT from Whitney to Happy Isles, in 7 days and 11 hours.  Not bad for a 75 year old!  The reason I don’t go with him is because there is NO way I want to go that fast!  I love the JMT, but not at that speed.

Fixit and I did the whole Tahoe Rim Trail last summer also, in 7 1/2 days.  It was tougher than we expected, but really awesome.

So the CDT looks like a big challenge, but we think we are up for it.  And it will sortakinda be a Triple for us.