Skip to main content

Make good decisions (D-6)

If you look closely at the above photo, you might wonder just like I did...why is the big rock not sliding off the bottom rock or rather, when will it slide off? These are the kind of inane questions one asks when one is walking 9-10 hours a day mostly in solitude. On the other hand, walking 9-10 hours/day makes it a busy day (a topic for a later post) and directly to blog at the end of the day. Well, that's my excuse for not updating in a long time. I did say that I would do this occasionally, didn't I?

Day 6 was a pleasant and relatively easy day.
I reached Mike's Place around 4 pm after about 17 miles. Mike's Place is a mainstay in PCT thru-hiker lore. He opens his property to hikers to camp anywhere as well as provides water in huge tanks. I was initially planning to just fill water and proceed on, since the weather was great and there were couple more hours of sunlight left.
Weather when I reached Mike's - clear and sunny. In the foreground, you can see the Spot emergency device that also tracks my progress with an hourly ping.
Mike's property has a collection of interesting (or "junk" depending on your take) articles spread across.
Anyway, the weather forecast to the best of everybody's knowledge was rain/wind during the night. No idea how much and when. I'm any case, though I was tempted to go on, I decided to stay at Mike's for the night. And, boy, am I glad I did 'cos it poured buckets accompanied with high winds overnight. As my mentor and friend, M says, you have to make good and wise decisions, especially in the wilderness. One good decision made!

That was my "luxury" sleeping pad in the swing under the porch
A short day:

Comments

[v] said…
Rock sliding off :D

Did you resist the urge to calculate the extra mass required or slope required for the that rock to slide off?
Vipul said…
No temptation to go up and carve your name on that stone Ravi 😀

Popular posts from this blog

In-town & Trail Activities (D-45 @ 903.3 and D-46 4.3 miles plus 906.7 - 924.5)

I am still surprised how busy in-town zero days can be. You think that you have a lot of time to take care of everything that you had planned to do while hiking earlier. Yesterday, in Mammoth Lakes, first I had a large breakfast (very important thru-hiker activity) & then visited 3 different stores to research and buy new shoes & glove liners. Old ones were completely gone. Post that, went to the big grocery store to buy the resupply food till the next stop & as usual, got overwhelmed by the number of the items available, picked up excess items, realized I can't carry all this, put back a lot of stuff and still ended up with extra food to carry. Next stop was the pharmacy to get blister-care bandages, then a decent sized pizza lunch and then back to the room to sort and repack. Speaking of blisters, I have got 2 till now and I had to prick one of them with a needle a few days back and then cover it up. First time, I had to sterilize the needle in a flame and the...

The High (& sometimes scary) Passes of Seirras - Part 1 (D-38 760 - 774.7; D-39 774.7 - 795.5)

The 7 main mountain passes (a pass being the low-point saddle between two mountains that one has to cross to go on the other side of the mountain) that I had to cross were as follows (south to north): 1. Forester Pass (13200 ft / 4023 m) 2. Glen Pass (11957 ft / 3645 m) 3. Pinchot Pass (12127 ft / 3696 m) 4. Mather Pass (12094 ft / 3686 m) 5. Muir Pass (11970 ft / 3648 m) 6. Selden Pass (10913 ft / 3326 m) 7. Silver Pass (10778 ft / 3285 m) All of these passes have some ascent and then a descent and essentially, the descent of one pass leads to the ascent of the next without too much of a flat area in between. Because this was a low snow year (some reports put it as only 43% of the average trail snow which means a bad summer drought for California 🙁), hikers like me are able to enter the Seirras and hike through these passes so early. Of course, this also means that there is still quite a bit of snow left on the passes and around them, which makes them more difficult and...

My gear and my tramily (D-97 @ 2148 - Zero day)

Some of you have asked about what gear I am using. Since today is a Zero day (the last Zero day was on D-57) and there is nothing much to report other than the fact that I shipped the last set of resupply boxes to different places in Washington state and ate substantial amounts of food today, I figured I might as well talk about my gear, and also a bit about the other most essential component on the hike - my "tramily" (trail-family).   Tent : 1-person Rainbow Li from Tarptent (bought new). This has worked very well for me and as you know from my earlier posts, Tarptent has given very good customer service too. I haven't had the chance to use the tent in heavy rain or snow (luckily) though and can't comment on it. I use a Tyvek ground sheet (already owned), also from Tarptent. Backpack : Catalyst from ULA (already owned).  I started with Zpack Arc Air Robic 60L (bought new) and used it for 700 miles, but it was not comfortable at...