I know I am repeating myself, but what can I say – a beautiful morning leaving before sunrise again.

After getting out of the burn area we entered a nice pine forest again. I love the smell and also the beautiful pine cones. The cruise was nice and easy today. A constant up and down on the ridge but with gentle slopes.

For lunch we crashed on the porch of a vacation cabin which had a faucet which saved us finding a hidden water source. Since it was the heat of the day we ended up hanging out for a couple hours in our “new home”.

When we started moving we passed one the most awkward scenes on the trail. We passed “The Zoo” – here animals are kept which are used for movies in Hollywood. It was horrible to see how tigers, grizzlies and black bears were held in tiny little cages just walking up and down the fence. The most trist sight on the PCT so far…

 

The rest of the day passed by quickly. We cruised all downhill from the lunch break allowing us a good speed. We again bumped into trail magic. Someone put a dumpster in the middle of the forest stacked with sodas, cookies, emergency food and a couch. We couldn’t resist – typical hiker trash…
We do spend a fair amount of time on water filtering. Since we are still in areas which have roads and livestock it is the safer option even though I would rate some of the areas safe to drink without filtering. But so we sit next to water sources very often squeezing water from the dirt bag through a mechanical filter which takes out sediments but also 99% of all bacteria. Very smart but also very time consuming. Can’t wait to get into the real mountains to stop this 😂

 

More pine forest and nice ridge walks before we set camp on top of a little hill 4 miles outside of town. We wanted to save the money of an additional night in town and therefore camped close to the road.

Since it took us a bit longer than expected we were all running low on food and especially gas for cooking. One canister was already empty since yesterday and we had two left with maybe one boil – we managed to get enough water warm with both canisters to hydrate and warm up the food before they went out. Jiehaaa! On the spot 😎

Little joke of the trail (thanks to Bangerang for telling): Why is sex on the trail so good? Because it’s inten(t)se… 😂😂😂