PCT Day 35 - 24 Miles!

The temperature on top of the mountain and our home for the night dropped below freezing. This was the coldest so far and it made waking up hard because the tent was covered in snow. We have no heater to turn on so we must deal with the conditions, any condition nature throws at us. After Joe cleaned and scraped the ice off the tent we packed up and headed out. You can imagine, it was freezing so the ground held the dusting of snow for another hour or so, then as we descended some it warmed up and quickly melted. I stopped to remove my puffer coat, and suddenly heard a helicopter overhead. Then two helicopters! As we made our miles down the mountain side to Mill Creek, we watched those chopters come back at least seven or eight more times, each time someone buckled into a hanging harness and off they flew. I wanted a ride! (We later learned they were linemen working on the enormous power lines) We descended 2,000 ft to Mill Creek about 7 miles in, we stopped for an early lunch at about 10:30 AM, more importantly we wanted to dry our tent. Also we needed water which we got from a remote fire station up a road. The air was still chilly, but after lunch we did some climbing again. Eventually the clouds disappeared and we could again see everything there was to see. There were so many mountains today both near and far. The Angeles national Forest led us from one mountain to the next by sending us to the valley floor and up again.

We decided early on our mileage should be high because we feel behind – realistically we only have a couple days of food left, so we’d like to make it to Hiker Heaven tomorrow. But that’s still 44 miles away. I tell Joe I’d rather do heavy miles today than tomorrow. Early on we decided to camp around mile 432 but we ended up going 4 extra miles do to the large mountain we had to decline. That put us at our highest mileage yet- 24 miles!