Burney Falls to Etna

I hiked out of Burney Falls and past the Lake Britton Dam. 

The Lake Britton Dam

Between the hatchery in the last post and the dam here, I'd covered two out of the four H's (Hatcheries, Hydropower, Habitat destruction, and Harvest) in the last stretch.  These are known as the four horsemen of the apocalypse for salmon, but I try to keep in mind that everything is connected.  I remember being at a party in grad school, and a guy chatting me up.  The conversation went something like this:

Him:  "So, what do you do?"

Me:  "I'm a masters student in fisheries."

Him:  "Fisheries?  Cool.  You know, I think they should rip all of those dams out of the Columbia.  Every single one."

Me:  "Hmm...  What do you do?"

Him:  "I'm an engineer at Boeing."  

Boeing, which was located in Seattle because electricity was cheap BECAUSE OF ALL OF THOSE DAMS ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER.  So, I included this picture of the electricity being carried out to the towns, to remind us that everything is connected. 

For the next few days Mount Shasta lay beautiful in the distance, and I photographed it over and over. 

OK, people ID'd the California king snake, any idea what this one is?

I'd started picking up more food out of hiker boxes, and one thing I tried on this leg was MREs.  Probably everyone already knows this, but MREs are "Meals Ready to Eat," and they're designed for soldiers and used in the military but can be purchased by civilians.  I actually didn't even get these out of a hiker box (the ones in Burney Falls had been thrown away), but got them directly from Golden Boy and Explagrance.  Their food drops were meant for three people but their mom had suffered a stress fracture and wasn't hiking anymore, so they had a lot to give away.  They weren't ideal hiker food because of the weight - they weren't dehydrated and had a lot of packaging, but they were pretty tasty. 

MREs come with plastic bags and small packages of something that emits heat when it gets wet.  You take out the heating element (see the white thing in the lower half of the plastic bag), put a little water in the bottom of the plastic bag, and then slide the element and the meal in its foil package in together.  You lay the whole thing flat so the meal is on top of the element, and the water wets the element.  The element gets really hot immediately, and the heat rises into the meal.  You then fold the top of the plastic package down and stuff the whole thing into the cardboard box that the meal came in (see above), and leave it until the meal is thoroughly warmed.  It's a little too heavy for hiking but it's a really cool system and I was impressed with it.  I think it would be great for any situation where you were just out for a day or even a few days, because the weight of the extra stuff required wouldn't be more than the weight of a camp stove.  Since it's designed for the military there might also be the issue of not wanting to light a stove and be detected by someone that way, but I really don't know.   

Fireball had been a marine and examined the MREs with interest, telling us that in his day there hadn't been any heating elements and that they had eaten them cold.

This is poison oak, which is apparently all over this section.  Another hiker showed it to me but I just always forget to watch for it. 

Castella was an interesting stop - a little bizarre, but not bad.  Rather than hitch from the trail and then hitch back to the trail, I took a walking detour.  I walked a few miles along Frontage Road to the Chevron Station, which is called Amirati's.  Amirati's accepts packages for hikers, has minimal resupply (think of a large convenience store that's just been decimated by a horde of hikers), and a post office next to it.  I think there was an actual town of Castela that was located somewhere else but I'm not sure, that may have been it. 

Walking into Castella on Frontage Road, passing what I presume was the old gas station

Walking to Amirati's I crossed under I-5, which I thought was kind of significant.  The PCT is far east of I-5 for most of the trail, but between here and the very south of Oregon runs west of it.  In case I haven't posted it before, a good map showing the PCT on a Google map is available on the Postholer website. 

Crossing under I-5

Amirati's Market, the new gas station

I grabbed a sandwich and some drinks, picked up my bounce box, and walked with Fireball to the Castle Crags State Campground.  The campground had a spot reserved for PCT hikers and was occupied by an assortment of hikers, plus a few more who showed up later in the dark.

Castle Crags State Park

The next day I showered at the campground, and walked back to Amirati's with El Hefe who I'd camped with at Burney Falls, and New Orleans, a woman from South Africa whom I'd met at the kickoff party.  People left for the trail and for the nearby town of Shasta, and a few new people showed up.  I left in the late afternoon and walked through the campground and up a series of dirt roads to meet back up with the trail.  The dirt roads came within a quarter mile of it so I had to do a little scrambling up a hill with no trail, but it didn't take too long before I was back on the PCT.  

Walking a dirt road back to the trail

Castle Crags

Looking back on Castle Crags

More panorama

During this leg I bounced around with an informal group of hikers - no one was hiking together necessarily, but most of us camped together most nights and I enjoyed everyone's company.  One hiker that I'd never met had made up an activity for every day of the week for hikers.  I can't remember all of the days, but I do remember "Topless Tuesday" and "Pudding Wednesday."  Solstice celebrated these days, and she had not only carried a large package of pudding out from the last town stop, but when she realized that it wasn't instant, she actually cooked it on her camp stove.  She told us that we each had to contribute something to the pudding, whatever we had, she didn't care what.  I had some trail mix of chocolate, dried banana chips, and peanuts, and she crumbled some into the pudding when she was finished cooking it.  She did the same with the contributions of the others, and then passed the bowl around us in a circle.  The pudding had some kind of coconut flavor and the additions to it all worked, and it was great fun to pass the bowl around and take turns taking spoonfuls out of it. 

Solstice (background) and Shady Acres (foreground), with the Wednesday pudding

Porcupine Lake

I'm not sure if it's visible in this picture or not, but the trail was visible along the full length of this ridge.  One of the most fun things about hiking the PCT has become looking forward at the trail over long stretches and then looking back at them an hour later.

At one point on the trail we were warned by some weekend hikers about fires near the PCT north of us, and Solstice and I stopped at the next road to ask a couple in an RV if they'd heard anything.  RT and Sean were working on a project identifying plants along the PCT, and while RT's online search indicated that the fires weren't too close to the trail, I found myself more interested in what they were doing.  I think the only website right now is this one, but they're working with a web developer to launch a site that's interactive and can be used to ID the plants, and I hope they'll contact me once that's up. 

On this leg I met a few groups of kids from a camp called Unalayee.  They were setting off independently from the same trail head on four-day camping trips to different destinations, and they struck me by the fact that they were kids who seemed to be having fun rather than just struggling under their heavy packs.  I don't know anything about this camp but I was pretty impressed with the kids, especially by the way that the few who spoke to me did so with confidence. 

Another plant that I'd love to know something about

Coming down towards a highway I found a volunteer crew doing trail maintenance.  I stopped and thanked each one and gave them cards for my blog, and found that one, named Nowhere Man, was already following it, having been turned onto it by Warner Springs Monty.  I told him how I'd seen a group of young people, maybe college-age kids, working on the trail on the way into Belden.  They'd been friendly but I'd been in too big of a hurry to get into town to ask them any questions, and was curious who they'd been with.  He said that Americorps had groups of youth volunteers doing trail maintenance, and told me a bit about the different groups working on the trail.  He definitely had one point to make regarding the various groups working on the trail, and that was to stress the importance of groups like the Backcountry Horsemen, who use stock.  Apparently some hikers are against having stock on the trail, but horses are invaluable in moving impediments like large logs off of the trail to keep it open.  Nowhere Man's shirt said "PCTA Trail Crew" but a few others had on shirts that said "Lion's Pride," and I understood that this was the name of their group.  At any rate, I'm grateful to them for their work, and grateful to groups like the Backcountry Horsemen as well.   

Nowhere Man!

The Lion's Pride had also kindly organized some trail magic in the form of fruit salad and refreshments but I stupidly missed the turnoff to the side trail and needed to put in some miles that day, so I just kept going. 

The signs in this section clearly marked the PCT and the turnoffs from it.  Apparently 2000 is the number of the PCT, like Interstate 5 or Interstate 90, it's "Trail 2000."  It was the same on all of the signs at various mileages and there aren't 2,000 miles of PCT in either direction, so it isn't about mileage.

I finally solved a mystery, which was what these little piles were.  I passed a tree where the little flakes were being hurled down periodically, and moved around until I could see the culprit.  A squirrel was eating a green pinecone, chewing each leaf of it and then tossing the leaf down onto the pile.  I stayed and watched him until he finished the cone, and tossed it's cob down as well. 

The south fork of the Scott River - California, you're so cute with what you call a "river."

The trail crossed Forest Highway 93 where there was a trail head and a small parking lot, and stopped there to make dinner.  The road wound maybe 50 feet below the parking lot, and I could see the cars passing by on the highway.  One small pickup truck saw me, stopped and turned around, and pulled into the little lot.  A young man with shoulder-length hair smiled out of his window.

"Excuse me, but do you have any rolling papers?"  I laughed.

"You turned around to come and ask me that?  No, I'm hiking."

"Well," he said, "would you like a little nug for the road?"

"I actually don't smoke," I told him. "I'm not against it, I think it should be legal, it's just not my high of choice."

"Well, what's your high of choice?"

"I guess just alcohol," I told him, "I'm pretty boring."

"Alcohol and a little LSD?"  he asked.  I laughed again, and assured him that I was boring.  I couldn't stop smiling, though, because I was so flattered that someone turned around on the highway and drove back to hit on me.  He realized that he wasn't going to get anywhere and left, and circling the small lot slowly to turn around.  On his way back past me in the little lot he waved, and I waved excitedly and smiled.  On his way back past me on the highway he honked the horn and made a peace sign, and I smiled and waved harder.  It didn't make a whole lot of sense, but it made me smile bigger than anything had for quite awhile. 

Panorama is my new favorite thing.

I did 32 miles, my new longest day, before sleeping on the trail 12 miles out from Sawyer's Bar Road.  In the morning I got up early and charged towards the road.  A few miles two helicopters flew over me, headed for fires in the valley to the west.  I would see them circling as I walked the last hour to the road.  They were too high to be firefighting and it seemed like they were just surveying the situation, but I wasn't sure. 

The second of the two helicopters as it flew over

When I got the road it was closed and I figured I was out of luck for getting a ride into town, but as soon as I'd snapped a few photos and thought seriously about taking my shoes off, a truck pulled up.  I hopped into Marty's truck and he handed me a bagged lunch with more food in it than even a hiker could eat and gave me a gatorade out of a cooler in the back.  He was an engineer working as a firefighter, and we discussed the overlap in our academic backgrounds, working in fields other than those we were educated in, and life in general, and before I knew it we were in Etna and Marty was dropping me off at the Hiker Hut.   

Look down the valley to the right - the smoke is visible.

This information placard was posted along side the road.

Marty!

I did remember to ask Marty something that I'd been wondering about the fires.  I remembered learning in an ecology class that before European settlement fires were a very regular occurrence, but that they didn't burn hot enough to kill the living trees.  Now fire is prevented which leads to a large buildup of dead wood, so that when a fire does start, it burns hot enough to kill everything in its path.  I ran this by Marty and he confirmed it.  It's not like we could do this differently - we need to prevent fires if we're going to have farms and everything else that we have, but it's definitely an ecological irony.