Month: September 2016

I packed up my 5 days of food, and bade a sorrowful farewell to my warm hotel room. Jacuzzi, I hardly knew ye.

We had a quick hotel buffet breakfast, and hitched out of town. After watching numerous tourists drive by and pretend they weren’t looking at us, we rode with a couple of Leavenworth residents who were heading out hiking themselves.

Leavenworth’s population is only 2000. At this point, we’ve hitched with 0.2% of the city population.

Getting back on the trail was hard. This was it for modern conveniences until the end of our trip. Within a couple hours, our phones would lose signal, probably until the end of the trip.

It rained on us soon after we set out, but by lunch there were sunny spots to sit down and eat.

After lunch, the clouds just kept getting sparser and sparser. Soon, the weather was looking downright nice.

And then, downright pristine.

So, I guess Washington can be nice sometimes. But, it’s not obligated to.

175 miles left.

We awoke to a big surprise. There was no condensation anywhere. My sleeping bag was still warm. Even the weather was not that cold this morning. We had camped next to a lake, which usually means cold and condensation, but the weather gave us a break today.

Our only predicament was logistical: We were a few miles away from Highway 2, where we were going to resupply. I had mailed a resupply package to Skykomish, a small town west of the trail on the highway. The post office was only open from 8-10AM, so we needed to get to the road and get a ride fairly quickly. Then, we wanted to stay in Leavenworth, a fake-Bavarian town that was also on Highway 2, but in the opposite direction. So we needed to hike fast, and be lucky hitching rides, or I’d lose my resupply package, and/or not be able to stay in Leavenworth.

Leavenworth is a small town — population 2000 — where all buildings are required by city code to have old-fashioned Bavarian facades. So it seemed like a fun place to stay for our last real town resupply.

Getting up early was frustrating, since I’d slept so poorly the night before, due to the cold. But, with an early start, and brisk hike, I got to Highway 2 by 9:15.

Within a minute, I had hitched a ride with a USDA employee from Leavenworth. He was headed towards Seattle, and passing through Skykomish. I joked about the clearcutting we’ve seen on the trail. “You can thank Pinchot for that,” he said. I was proud to get the joke.

Skykomish was an interesting town. It was very small, very train themed, and nearly everybody seemed to be retired. The garbage cans had small placards on the top indicating that they were placed by the “Skykomish Old-Timers’ Club”.

After picking up my resupply package from the friendly small-town post office, we went to the town’s restaurant/inn for a second breakfast and a milkshake. Yes, it is actually appropriate to have a milkshake at second breakfast.

The milkshake was frosty and icy, but not very flavorful — good on a hot day, but not on a cool morning.

After reserving a place to stay in Leavenworth (we had to get a jacuzzi suite, it was the only room left), we took a look at the Skykomish Train Museum.

After inspecting their display of tools, parts, and models, we went out back to the rideable model train. It was just about to leave when we reached the station, so we hopped on board.

That done, we’d pretty much exhausted Skykomish’s attractions, so we hitched back east, towards Leavenworth.

This was surprisingly difficult. It was Saturday morning, so many people were driving east on 2. But, in general, it’s the locals that pick up PCT hikers, not the tourists. So we waited a good long while.

Then, a truck we recognized picked us up.

It was Legend, a trail angel who shuttles hikers around. I’d first met him at Ziggy and the Bear’s, where he ate my pizza crusts before driving some hikers around the Lake Fire closure.

The back of the truck was filled with his belongings, and the cab was already filled with hikers. “Let’s play hippie Tetris” he said, as people shuffled around to fit us into the cab. We were the 6th and 7th to fit in there.

After a brief ride, we were back in Stevens Pass. Which was progress, but he wasn’t going all the way to Leavenworth. We had to hitch again.

Another Leavenworth local, Jim, picked us up. The drive from Stevens Pass to Leavenworth is a bit long — about 35 miles — but Jim was able to tell us all about the town history, the local foliage, and even the fish in the river, before dropping us off at our hotel.

Our room wasn’t ready yet, so we dropped off our backpacks and headed downtown in search of lunch.

Downtown certainly didn’t disappoint. Every building had fake old Bavarian architecture, and every public fixture from the lampposts to the park’s gazebo was spilling over with flowers.

They enforced their fake-German building code on every business that moved in, no exceptions. Everybody had to have carved wood signs with a Germanic font, and murals of adequately Teutonic scenes. No exceptions.

We settled on Munchen Haus, which is a pretzel, sausage, and beer place with gaudy murals.

Sadly, the murals were probably the best part. The pretzel was, well, a pretzel. I tried beer from both of the town’s breweries — Icicle Brewing and Doghaus — but neither was very good. Or very German.

We headed back to the hotel, down the tourist streets, and saw to a lot of errands.

We had a good dinner at a restaurant with a generic name I can’t quite recall — something like “Bavarian Pub and Restaurant”. My brussels sprouts with creamy mustard sauce were memorably good. They also served the first good smoked salmon I’ve had on the trail.

Before heading back to the hotel, I needed to buy some more food for the next stretch, so I stopped at the local grocery store, Dan’s. Maybe it doesn’t have the most Teutonic name, but it was decorated like all the other businesses in town.

They had everything I needed — a wide variety of trail mixes and bars mainly — as well as good choices for our last town nights dessert.

At the hotel room, we had our ice cream, and two good Washingtonian beers. We bid the resources of a big town goodbye, and went to bed.

As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about how much of a pain it must be to open a business here. McDonald’s has standardized signs, architecture, and so forth, but city government forced the franchise owner to get a woodcut fake-Bavarian road sign. It was probably hard to get corporate headquarters to approve the non-standard version of their logo. And probably not cheap to get a bunch of murals in an identical style to every other business in town. So the irony began to strike me: Leavenworth owes its fake-German character to a town government that’s kind of, well, fascist.

197 miles left.

I awoke this morning long before sunlight. It wasn’t the sun that woke me up, it was the cold. Condensation had formed on my quilt, compromising the down’s ability to hold warmth. I shivered for a couple more hours before getting up. We’d had our first frost this morning.

I was prepared for the worst, but a funny thing happened today: The sky kept getting bluer and bluer.

Throughout the morning, it kept getting warmer and warmer, and by lunch we had plenty of sun to dry our wet gear.

Of course, I spent most of the day in gloves, it never really got all that warm. I was cold like usual, just the skies were blue this time.

We made it to our planned campsite just as it was getting dark and cold. We set up our tents, and crawled inside for the night.

202 miles left.