Bending to PO Schedule (D-74: 1516.9 - 1548, D-75: 1548 - 1579, D-76: 1579 - 1610.4, D-77: 1610.4 - 1641.5, D-78: 1641.5 - 1655.9)

Hiking into Castella, realized that our next resupply box was waiting at Seiad Valley post office and July 3rd was a Sunday & July 4th was a federal holiday which meant a closed PO. That meant we had to get there by July 2nd afternoon 'cos the PO would only be open from 12 noon to 1:30 pm on a Saturday. Seiad Valley was 156 miles from Castella and there were 4.5 days left to get there! The original plan to stop at Etna, a town in-between, so that we needed to carry only 2-3 days of food, was out of the window 😏. The only way to achieve this was to hike long days and complete at least 31+ miles every day for the next 4 days, leaving 14-15 miles for the last half-day. Suffice to say, this was successfully achieved and today we reached Seiad Valley at 9:45 am, well before the PO opened 🙂. Felt good too at completing Day 78 with less than three-figure number of miles left! Of course, the end of each 31-mile day was marked with tired legs, especially the last two days which had high elevation gain too. This is not something I would like to repeat 😬, but this was sorta forced on us if we did not want to "waste" two days 'cos the PO was closed.

Needless to say, today was a nero day to get some rest and enjoy town food, even if Seiad Valley is a really small place with a cafe that closes at 2 pm, a small convenience store and an RV campground - all three of which we made good use of today. Had breakfast & lunch-to-go at the Cafe, bought dinner at the store and are camping at the RV campground tonight. All, as well as the PO are next to each other and very conveniently for us, this town is actually on PCT trail (no need to hitch anywhere).

One thing notable about the trail the last 3 days was the huge number of fallen trees that blocked the trail. It was a veritable obstacle course. On Day 76, we crossed around 300 such trees, and on Day 77, more than 100 within the first three hours. Lots of wasted time and effort trying to carefully cross these, as well as getting clothes & self blackened as a lot of these downed trees were burnt and soot covered. Just one example below:

Saw this distance marker (one of only 2):

Just when all the international hikers were getting used to figuring out distances in miles, the Shasta - Trinity Wilderness Area changes it up 😀

After a long, long, long time, got some trail magic! Yaaaaaay!! Water melon and cream soda in the middle of a long hot day. Did I mention that the last five days were quite warm too?

Back to snow traverses yesterday. Guess we were high enough (above 7000 ft) and north enough that we were going to hit some unmelted snow fields. Small ones though.

Cowboy camped on Day 74 and managed to see a falling star, the International Space Station as well as the Milky Way in a single night. That was cool!

A few other pics from the last few days:

And, finally this from just a few minutes ago - a couple of bucks walking by the campground

Data:

D-74: 

D-75: 

D-76: 

D-77: 

D-78: