Day 1 - Inadvertent Trail Angels

May 25, 2016. Fair warning. This is very verbose because I am typing it on a laptop keyboard at Lake Morena. When I make entries from my phone they will be quite terse.

Made it to Hauser Creek. We had planned to camp earlier and just get an easy start of 10 mi. the first day. Increasing 1% a day with a couple of days around 17 to plateau. We started at 8:00 or so. But we reached mile 10.1 around 1:00. So we decided we could make Hauser easily. 

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The day started a week earlier. We were in St. Petersburg Florida for Maddie’s graduation from Eckerd College. So, there were activities and tasks around graduation. More for Maddie than Susan and I. But, Maddie also had to move out of her apartment. So there was a fair bit of work to do to get her out of there and clean up the apartment at the end. We did have a great time with the guests who arrived to attend the graduation. Which was on Sunday. Then we headed to Tampa Bay airport Monday. Flew to Ontario, CA to do our final staging at my older daughter Abbey’s - who lives nearby. So, we had a whole day Tuesday to finish prep. No problem. We started early. I said we should get our gear sorted and start on food by noon. We started on food about 6:00 pm. But we didn’t really have much food since Susan is supporting us. So, we have a “catered” PCT Hike as I’ve heard people call it who are ahead of us this year. They started on time, right around April 24. We are about a month late. Late only if the snow flies in the Cascades before we can finish. Well, what can we do. Time to get to hiking.

We left Abbey’s at 3:00 am for the 3 hour drive. Made good time and arrived just about 7:20. We took the obligatory start photos at the border monument. Touched the border wall and “Mexico” through the wall. An our or so later we launched our hike. It’s good to be walking after a week of entropy and chaos. Fun entropy and chaos, but still tiring.

At Hauser Creek we met Portage. He was going slower than he planned and needed some water. We were overcautious and brought too much. So we solve both our problems and gave him our extra water so we didn’t have to haul it up the climb out of the canyon in the morning. So technically we became Trail Angels.

Carryed 8 liters of water each. Which is very heavy. Our knees were sore and Maddie’s hips were bruising from her pack. I had changed sox 3 times. No blisters but my feet felt like the both soles were just one big hot spot.

We ate a lovely cold meal of re-hydrated Lasagna. We're not carrying a stove on purpose. Then we slept about 12 hours.

There’s quite a bit of poison oak around Hauser Creek camp. Which reminds me that another feared plant on the PCT is the Poodle Dog Bush. Which apparently can cause similar symptoms as poison oak. I looked at photos of a Poodle Dog Bush months ago but now I can’t recollect exactly what it looks like and I’ve warned Maddie we should just avoid any sort of plant with a Poodley Appendage.