Fifty days hiking would have seemed out of the question a little over a year ago. Here we are at day fifty and the PCT did not shy away from difficulty today. The beauty always makes up for it but damn… it was one of those days.

We got up and moving in the earlier side as Mackenzie and I camped a couple miles back from Spoons and Fly Lord. It was comforting to see them still in their tents as we walked passed their campsite so we decided to take a load off and have some (instant) coffee. The mix of breakfast essentials, hot cocoa, and instant coffee still tastes great to me in the morning. I’ve enjoyed the hot drink every morning.

After a quick breakfast, we kept climbing towards our first pass of the day, Pinchot Pass. It has been a half day climb up for us towards the pass and just before the last push up, we ran into Snowball. We first met near Agua Dulce and have been playing leap frog for a bit. It was comforting to know that he too was feeling so slow up these mountains. The crazy elevation change and altitude has slowed our pace as compared to the desert and were all feeling it.

After reaching the pass, we wandered down to a glacier lake for some additional r&r. I was feeling tired and a bit nauseous this morning so any and all rest I welcome today. We agreed to push from this point to another campsite about halfway up the next pass of the day to grab some lunch.

Snowball stopped in for a bit to have some lunch with us and headed on. We made it to the Mather Pass around 5 PM. We couldn’t sit around too long as we had another climb down to get to our final spot for the day. About four miles in, we stopped for some dinner and watched the sunset. Once dark, we had about 4ish more miles left but didn’t realize our next section was switchbacks straight downhill with multiple sections washed out. It made for slow moving. Rather than push the additional four, mackenzie and I are camped about a mile back to wait for the morning light to guide us through some of the blowdowns.

Exhausted and ready for sleep.

Happy trails…