Wednesday, August 20, 2008

August 13:We're in Washington!!

It was about 7am when we started our walk across the Bridge of the Gods and into Washington. This is a toll bridge that normally charges $0.50 for pedestrians to cross, but I guess they figure it would be wierd to charge hikers since it is technically part of the trail. So we walked across for free.

About half way across is a "Welcome to Washington" sign where we stopped to take a few pictures. Luckily there wasn't much traffic since there wasn't a sidewalk.

Our day was spent going up. Since Cascade Locks is basically at sea level, you don't have much choice. We had an initial climb of 3300 ft, then lost more than half of it before climbing back up to the same elevation before eading right back down. It was a lot of work. I think we climbed at least 5-6000 ft today.

On our last climb up, we came across the wierdest sight. There was a man in jeans and a flannel shirt hauling all kinds of luggage up the huge hill we wee climbing up. No joke- he had 6 different things he was hauling. Two HUGE canvas bags (Mark said, "big enough for a body, so I kicked one on the way by to make sure."), 3 suitcases (the plastic hard kind), and one several gallon water container. He was definitely a bit strange. he said he was on a long hike and rambled on about money and food stamps. We all pretty much hurried past him and were thankful we still had a few miles to go before camping!

We were all pretty much dead by the time we hit camp. I kept thinking that it felt like a neverending couple of miles, but we got in and decided to set up only the bugnet.

Later in the night I woke up to Mark saying, "Get out you little bugger!" Turns out a mouse had burrowed in the dirt under the mosquito netting and then was frantically trying to figure out how to get out. He was running around the perimeter of the netting throwing himself against the netting. He left pretty quickly once we pulled up some spots to let him out. Luckily he didn't eat more than a half of a chocolate covered raisin. Always a surprise, but at least there were no slugs!

Total Miles:2185.7
Miles Today:30.7
Camp 108:Mouse in the House

------------------------------
Have a spare PocketMail laying around, sell it back to us and help those in need.

No comments: