The Rain - Cascade Locks to Stevens Pass

This is so far back now that I can't remember as much as I wish I could, it's just kind of going to be a stream of consciousness and I'll probably get some people's names wrong, so sorry and please correct me if it's yours...

Cascade Locks to Trout Lake

I zeroed in Cascade Locks at the home of Shrek, the local trail angel.  A lot of the people who had been hiking around me in northern Oregon had gotten worried about their progress and skipped up further north, some having hitched up to the Trail Days party and simply hiked north from there, and others skipping other recent sections.  The general explanation was that people were worried about running out of time before winter hit, but since there were no specific dates attached to the looming onset of the season I didn't see it as a legitimate excuse and simply kept plodding along.  Although I would later find that I'd simply been in a lull and there were quite a few people behind me, for the time being I found myself well behind the pack.  This worked to my advantage in Cascade Locks.  Shrek had suddenly found his house empty of hikers, and celebrating the end of the season gave me free run of the house (like most trail angels he usually has hikers camp in the yard and just come in to use the bathroom), and even took some cash out of his donation jar to buy Bloody Mary fixings.

Shrek!

I hit the trail a day later than I had planned, walking across the Bridge of the Gods and into the Washington woods.

Yeah, I'm definitely in Washington.

This poster reminded me of an experience I had in the High Sierras...

A poster warning about the presence of cougars (mountain lions) reminded me of an experience I'd had in the High Sierras.  I'd hiked over Kearsarge Pass to get back to the trail in the morning, and then had hiked the next pass north on the trail (was it Glen Pass?) in the afternoon.  I'd gotten over the second pass in the light, but was still making my way down into the valley below when darkness fell.  I knew there was a river with a lot of space for camping a little ways down from where I was, so I was wearing my headlamp and moving slowly along the trail when I saw it - the glowing eyes of a mountain lion, staring back at me.  I froze in fear.  Later, when I saw bears, I would know what to do.  I'd spent enough time around bears in Alaska to know how to act, but with cougars I didn't have a clue - should I stand still?  Move away?  Make noise?  Stay quiet?  The cougar moved slowly towards me, it's eyes glowing green in the light from my headlamp, and I stood paralyzed.  Hours seemed to pass as he moved towards me at a diagonal, his glowing eyes fixed on me, and finally crossed the trail maybe 50 feet ahead.  After he crossed the trail he was angled in part away from me, and my headlamp began to show his body.  He was a deer.  Fluffy butt, little tail sticking up in the air - straight up Bambi.  Yes, that's right folks, I stood for who knows how long, paralyzed in fear of an herbivorous ungulate.  I'm so awesome.  Everybody wants to be me.

I got to see a little bit of the beauty of Washington in the south of the state, but just a little bit.  

If I remember correctly I hiked into the dark and cowboy camped on the trail my first night, and woke to a light sprinkle of rain around 4:00 AM.  I quickly packed up before my sleeping bag or anything else got too wet, but the weather never recovered on this section.

Since views were obscured,...

...I began taking pictures of smaller details,

...which most often meant interesting-looking mushrooms.

I followed John and Terry's advice and used my tarp to keep my tent more dry and that helped a lot, but I would still get soaked through just walking.  I had a rainproof jacket but the sleeves were a little short and I had nothing to keep me dry below the waist, and I found that it was difficult to stop even long enough to make a hot drink without getting thoroughly chilled.  After a few days of walking in the rain I was cold enough that when I had the chance I jumped off of the trail ten miles before the highway into Trout Lake.  Julie, who had been out for a day hike, was driving through Trout Lake on her way home and kindly dropped me off there.

Julie!

Trout Lake to White Pass

The General Store at Trout Lake rented rooms to hikers at very reasonable rates, and Beverly and Alisa, the mother and daughter working in the store, were warm and friendly.

The Trout Lake General Store

It was mushroom foraging season in Trout Lake, an event which draws in people from states away.  I met one young man from Montana who drove over every season to make money picking mushrooms.  I also met a number of immigrants who did it - I'd met a Russian-speaking man on the trail on the way in who showed me what he had collected, and met a group of Laotian men in the store's parking lot who had apparently hit a goldmine of white chantrels and were kind enough to let me snap a few shots of their operation.

Laotian mushroom forager with white chantrels

When I asked where they were from, the man who spoke English the most fluently (not pictured here) told me Laos, and then his face became serious as he asked me if I knew where it was.  I assured him that I did, but couldn't help remembering the King of the Hill episode where the Laotian family moves into the neighborhood, and had to bite my lip not to laugh:

Rednecks, trying to welcome their new neighbor:  Are you Chinese, or Japanese?

New neighbor:  We are from Laos.

Rednecks, looking at each other in confusion:  Is that Chinese, or Japanese?

My room had three small beds and I'd told Beverly and Alisa that I'd happily share it with other hikers, so I returned from eating to find Otherworld occupying one of them.  We got along well and she explained to me that the price of the room had not increased when she'd moved into it, so she could simply rent the room the next night and I could stay that night too, and then we'd be even.  I was sufficiently worried about the changing of the seasons that I didn't want to take zero days any longer, but I did have that last ten miles to do before the main highway, so I went out and slackpacked that stretch and then came back into town in the late afternoon.  I got a ride out from a young local man named Aaron, walked an uneventful ten miles in tolerable weather, and then caught a ride back from a friendly couple from Bellingham named Monty and Gretchen, and their sweet but nervous dog who kept trying to get away from  me and launch himself into the front seat where his owners were, until he finally acclimated to me and relaxed just a few miles before Trout Lake.

On the walk I was hyper-aware of mushrooms and photographed almost nothing else, although I had no idea if what I was seeing was edible or not.  I'd actually love to take a mycology class, and added that to the list of things I'd like some education in to understand my hiking environment better, like geology, meteorology, botany, and terrestrial vertebrate biology.

It was also huckleberry season!  

Beverly and her grandson in the store

Another thing that I remember happening in Trout Lake was eating breakfast in the little diner attached to the Chevron station.  It was small enough that the waitress was also the cook, and after taking my order went behind the counter and cooked it in front of me.  We were alone for awhile before the place started to fill up with hikers and locals, and used the time to talk about traveling and books.  She was a Steinbeck fan but had never heard of A Russian Journey, the nonfiction work that he and Robert Capa produced together (his writing, Capa's photographs) after traveling together from Moscow to Ukraine to Georgia shortly after the end of World War II.  The book is not well known because is not among Steinbeck's best works.  His reason for writing it was good, he was listening to our government's instructions on how to relate to the Soviet Union take a 180 degree turn from being our war allies to being our peacetime communist enemies and he was like "whoa, wait, we're supposed to think they're bad suddenly?"  He and Capa set out to portray the people of the Soviet Union simply as people, which they of course were, but in my opinion he tried so hard not to say anything political that he succeeded in saying nothing at all.  Anyways, I was telling her about their trip and talking about the relationship between the two men in general, and she broke in:

"But Steinbeck wasn't in Italy with Capa.  He was in Spain with Capa, but then he went back to the U.S."

I honestly hadn't even known that Steinbeck had been in Spain with Capa, and being schooled on this by my waitress in a restaurant attached to a Chevron in the tiny town of Trout Lake made me happier than I can say.  I'd been thinking for many miles how I don't think I belong in the city anymore.  I think that many people feel this way, but that one thing that keeps them urban is the desire for a community of people that they can relate to, and this woman, whose name I stupidly forgot to write down, inadvertently pointed out to me that living far from a population center does not mean that you can not be intelligent and educated.

The next morning Otheworld and I got a ride with Andy, the friendly son of a woman whose name was on a list of local trail angels,

Andy!

and I headed into the Mount Adams Wilderness.

My nephew's name is Riley, so I guess if he ever thru-hikes he should take this shortcut.

A few views of Mount Adams:

Someone ahead of me had been making great sketches in the dirt with their trekking pole.  So many people leave the ends of candy bar wrappers or pieces of toilet paper blowing around, I thought it was wonderful that someone left things that were so fun to see and so impermanent.  Thank you, whoever drew these pictures.

A fun 2010 thru-hiker who was doing some section hiking and trail angeling - he had bought me a lovely Thai dinner in Cascade Locks and was hiking this section with some friends.

I think this is such a nice way to memorialize someone.  I searched for Matt S. Delson online so I could say something about who he was, but I didn't find any information about him.

This section included the Goat Rocks Wilderness, which is probably the most stunning part of the trail in Washington, if not in all three states, and I miraculously had my only days of good weather while hiking from the Washington border to Stevens Pass exactly here, where it counted the most:

Before the views started I was still fixated on the mushrooms.

I think the rocks in background are the same kind as those that comprised the Devil's Postpile outside of Red's Meadow.

I'd been keeping my eye out for a rock shaped like a goat, and was thrilled to find that the Goat Rocks are named for actual goats:

I tried getting close to them to get some good shots, but they wouldn't let me closer than this and simply  moved away from me each time I approached.  After a few tries I started to feel like I was harassing them, and settled for a picture this far away.

These plants make me think of Dr. Seuss.  

Someone takes their rock cairns very seriously.

The Knife's Edge on top of Old Snowy Peak is a kind of summit in the Goat Rocks Wilderness.  Near it the trail diverges, and signs used to mark the Knife's Edge as the hiker trail and the lower alternative as the stock trail (my navigational app still shows this distinction), but current signs simply mark the lower trail as the PCT and the Knife's Edge as an alternate.  I'm guessing this is because it's so steep, particularly on the north side, but the views were worth it.

Selfies on the Knife's Edge on top of Old Snowy Mountain

Adams and Ranier in one panorama?  Oh yeah...

...and again!

Heading down the Knife's Edge on the north side...

...honestly scared the crap out of me.

Heading down the Knife's Edge on the north side was steep enough that I had to move incredibly slowly, even using my hands at some points.  I moved so slowly that I wasn't off the ridge when it got dark, and I wasn't comfortable enough in the terrain to night hike in it.  So, I did the only thing I could, which was to camp on the windy ridge.  I slept fine, but I do remember waking up in the middle of the night to pee.  The tent would not stay where it was without my body inside it to hold it down (there had been nowhere to drive in the tent spikes on the rocky surface), so I had to squat right next to the tent to pee and hold it with one hand to keep it from blowing away while I did.  It was a beautiful place, though, and I woke up in the morning happy to still be walking the ridge.

I accidentally got about 50 yards off of the trail, and stumbled on an abandoned tent.  There was something inside it and I had to brace myself to open it and make sure it wasn't a body, but it was just a sleeping roll.  As soon as I verified that I charged off from it, thoroughly creeped out, and still have no idea how it came to be left there.

An abandoned tent - one of the creepier things I've come across on the trail

I made my way down through the last of the majestic scenery and into the trees, where I happened across a camp with four men in it.  They shouted at me to come and sit by the fire and have some coffee, and I charged over.  They were guides and a client who had just bagged a mountain goat, and they told me a little about it.  There are only twelve tags per year issued for mountain goats in Washington State, and these are "lifetime tags," meaning that you can not be issued more than one in your lifetime.  They considered it strictly a trophy hunt, and called the meat inedible and carried out only the skin with the head and hooves still attached.  This made me a little sad, but I must admit that I have never tried to eat a mountain goat and have no idea if I would consider one to be edible or not.  I remembered my friend Eli in Seattle.  The city was overrun with Canadian Geese, and the delicate sensibilities of Seattlites prevented the city and state from simply killing them.  There were campaigns where their eggs were shellacked with something to prevent them from hatching and all sorts of other projects, but the last time I was in Seattle the city was still infested.  A local official made a statement on the radio that one problem was that birds were inedible.  He wasn't just making this up, they had tried cooking them at homeless shelters and couldn't get people to eat them, but my friend Eli heard him make this statement and was deeply offended.

"My grandmother survived the famine in the Ukraine," he said indignantly, "she would have been so happy to eat a Canadian Goose."

And so, to honor his grandmother, he and a friend caught one in a local park and cooked it and ate it, and I loved him for this.

However, from a strictly managerial standpoint, it doesn't matter whether the meat is utilized or not.  I was in fisheries and not in wildlife, but from what I understand the tags for high-profile game animals like bears or mountain goats are so valuable that the small number of them sold each year bring in enough money to manage the resource, so that these men are paying for the state to manage these goats, or at least contributing significantly to it.

Anyways, I didn't get into any of this with them, but simply enjoyed their coffee and hearing about their trip and telling them about mine, and enjoyed their hospitality.  They soon informed me that I was staying for breakfast and served me a plate with eggs fried over-easy, fried potatoes perfectly seasoned, and thick strips of bacon.  After that they found me a coca-cola, and when I finally tore myself away saying that if I didn't leave soon I would lose my will to leave at all, they agreed to let me go only if I took a can of beer to drink later on the trail.

Jim, Burt, Jason, and Ken

Me posing with the spoils of the hunt - I'm trying to stick my tongue out the same way the goat's tongue is sticking out, but I'm not sure if you can really see it.

I walked the rest of the way into town delirious with the unexpected trail magic.  On the way I saw this curious cloud formation around Mount Ranier, and half waited for the top of the mountain to levitate and fly away, piloted by aliens who had parked there many centuries ago and simply sat camouflaged and observed us.

The few marmots I saw in Washington were much more flighty than those in the Sierras had been and I don't think I even got a good picture of one, but the Pika were much bolder than they had been in California.  They would sit exposed on a rock and make a loud squeaking noise.  Sometimes multiple Pika would do this from various locations suggesting that it was some sort of alarm system, but I'm really not sure.

Pika!

The PCT is basically just a really long tour of closed ski areas.

2300 miles!

White Pass to Snoqualmie Pass

I made it to White Pass in the afternoon, and found that the convenience store had enough resupply items for hikers that I wouldn't need to hitch into Packwood.

The friendly cashier, Terry, even helped me with mail drops of fuel for the North Cascades.  The store sold the small canisters of mixed isopropane and butane that I needed, and she found materials with which I could package them and got ahold of a local woman who was making a trip into Packwood the next day who would mail them for me.

Terry!

I was all set to just move through when a problem emerged that I couldn't solve.  My Satechi battery would no longer charge.  I needed it to charge up my phone, without which I wouldn't have a camera or a navigational device, and it simply refused to work.  I didn't even have cellular service to call the company from White Pass and I think I remember that it was a weekend anyways, so I caught a ride into Packwood figuring I could try to deal with it there.

Packwood had budget accomodations, including the place I stayed for $30, with shared bathrooms but nice, comfortable rooms and a cozy common area.  There were other hikers there, a group of three including Tragic (Elizabeth) who I would later get to know better, and another hiker who had flip-flopped and was now southbounding.  There was also a southbound bicycler having just finished a season tendering, and he and I headed to a local bar to see what Packwood was all about.  There we met Billy and Foozeball Dave.  Foozeball Dave had been friends with Billy's father, but their real connection was that they had been cell mates in prison, where they had both been sent for cooking meth.  I sang them a song and Foozeball Dave bought us a round of drinks, and then they told us about life in prison and about life after prison.  They were incredibly open in the way that people are only once they've actually cleaned up, and even explained to us how methamphetamines were cooked.  All I remember was that at some point little white flakes precipitate, and that's how you know that it's done.  We both really liked Billy and Foozeball Dave and when they invited us to go mushroom hunting the next day we both honestly wanted to say yes, but we both felt the pressure of time and of the changing season and knew that we needed to leave town the first thing the next morning.

Billy and Foozball Dave

My bike-touring partner in crime, who diagnosed and solved the problem with my Satechi battery

Back at White Pass I found a number of hikers including Fireball, who I thought had been ahead of me but had actually been behind after a bout with giardia had taken him off the trail for awhile.  It was late in the day but we hiked out three miles to where two other hikers were camped, and the four of us pitched our tents together.  In the morning it was pouring rain, and one of the guys decided to call it a season.  At first we tried to talk him out of it:

"Are you sure you want to quit?"

"Maybe you should hike another day and see if you still feel the same way."

"You're so close now!"

But as soon as it became clear that he was really done, we descended on him like vultures:

"I'll give you fifty bucks for your rain fly!"

"How much do you want for your rain pants?"

Within minutes we had every piece of waterproof gear on him (I paid $10 for a pair of frog tog rain pants rendered utterly useless by the many holes in them) and he had some money for the trip home and one by one we set off in our respective directions, three of us heading to the north and one heading south back to White Pass.

Fireball crossing a creek

The day was long and wet and cold, and I envied the hiker on his way home.  His trail name was "Whitney Shoeston," because he had summitted Mount Whitney in socks.  He had hiked the entire way from the Mexican border, but I guess just hadn't seen the point of continuing miserably through the cold rain.

I was so cold and wet that when I realized that there was a trailhead with bathrooms at Chinook Pass, I hiked as hard as I could to get to it so that I could sleep inside one of them.  A tiny, unheated room with a cement floor and a toilet was my goal, but when I got to Chinook Pass I found this:

Sam's note for hikers telling them about her trail magic

Sam from Olallie, who had driven me to meet Tom in Cascade Locks a couple of weeks earlier, was set up five miles from the pass doing trail magic.  I stuck out my thumb to hitch in her direction and the first car to stop was Sam herself, having just returned from dropping some hikers off in Packwood to buy more gear for the cold rain.  We hugged and I jumped in her truck, and we headed down to her camp.  She called it "Tarp City," and it consisted of a kitchen area, a u-haul for hanging clothes to dry them a little, and a large tent that Sam was living in, all covered by tarps and encircling a fire pit.  We also found Simba, one of the three I had camped with the night before, who had seen the sign and hitched down to the camp while Sam was in Packwood.  I pulled off my wet clothes and Sam lent me a dry sweatshirt, and I managed to get dressed warmly enough be comfortable and to hang my hiking clothes up in the u-haul.

Taking my shoes off I found the absolute ugliest foot I'd had on the entire trail.  It was my right foot and seemed to match the area on the inside heel of my right shoe that had worn down to the plastic frame of the shoe, despite the fact that I'd just gotten them in Ashland.  Even Sam and Simba cringed when they saw it, and each said they'd never seen a hiker's foot in worse shape.  The affected skin was all dead, though, so just I cut it off and threw it in the fire.

The worst-looking foot I had on the entire trail

Sam made a last trip up to the pass and came back with Marie and Ryan, a friendly couple I'd met just that day on the trail.  He was American, she Brazilian, and they lived together in Hawaii where she was a marine biologist and he was a mate on a ship, I think a research vessel.  Sam made us a hot spaghetti dinner, and the five of us sat around the fire, drinking away the cold until we were ready to crawl into bed.  I slept in her huge tent which also housed a heater and her dog Lali, who curled up with me, and I swear that no one has ever been happier for trail magic.

Sam makes us spaghetti

Marie and Ryan get ready to sleep in Sam's u-haul trailer

In the morning Sam made us breakfast and drove us back to the pass, and we all set off with the same goal.  The Ulrich Camp is a cabin maintained I believe by a snowmobile club, and it's one of the only shelters available along the trail in Washington.  One of the only officially available shelters, anyways.

(Clockwise) Me, Simba, Ryan, Sam, and Marie

That day I saw my first fresh snow, which although it wasn't much, should give some idea of how could the rain was:

I forgot to take any pictures of the Ulrich Camp but here's one that I borrowed from a 2010 PCT blog:

It had a large wood stove and hooks all over for hanging things to dry, and it even had a large upper floor.  There were thru-hikers and section hikers, maybe ten people all together, every one appreciating the warmth and the shelter.  The next day I set off for another shelter, a slightly less official one.

I'd heard from another hiker that there was an abandoned weather station 20 miles south of Snoqualmie Pass, and that he and others had stayed in it on their way through.  I'd told Ryan and Marie about it and they'd arrived hours before me, tidied the place up, and even swept the floor.  Simba had been hiking just a little ways ahead of me and had waited for me to make sure I found the place in the dark, and we walked in together to find the place not only clean, but also with electricity.  Even the electric heater worked, and we sat around joking about how tough it was going to be to hike the rest of the trail after having hiked this section where we basically had some kind of shelter every night.

Simba, Ryan, and Marie in the abandoned weather station

Leaving the abandoned weather station in the morning

A few miles after the abandoned weather station was where, just a few days later, a thru-hiking couple that I'd met a few times would save a life.  They would find a weekend hiker in his tent, blue from hypothermia and hours from death, and would strip his wet clothes off of him.  They would zip their own sleeping bags together and the husband would get in with the dying man while his wife ran a few miles to a place where she could get cell service and get a call out to Search and Rescue.  The man would recover fully and would visit them at the youth hostel in Snoqualmie to thank them, still having no recollection of the event.

Snoqualmie Pass

Snoqualmie Pass to Stevens Pass

In Snoqualmie I found Simba and had a fantastic chicken curry in a trailer parked in front of the gas station and then caught a ride to the Mostel, the youth hostel at Snoqualmie Pass.  I think the place is closed now but it was really lovely - everything in it was really nice, and one fun quirk included the fact that the loaner clothes (the clothes to be worn while all of your own clothes are in the wash) were all costumes formerly worn by Kara, the manager, during various phases of her life.  Even if my legs had been shaved I couldn't possibly have hoped to fit into her cheerleading uniforms, so I wore a long green gown that reminded me of the female role in Shrek (and entertained the entire crowd of hikers) while I did my laundry.

As I got ready to leave the next morning Kara was moving some old clothes of hers around and let me have one of her fleeces, which I would wear on the entire rest of the trail and be very grateful for.

Kara!

I set out from Snoqualmie with Hippie Longstockings, a hiker who I'd known at least since the Sierras.

The day we left it wasn't raining.  We knew the weather would be getting worse the next day, but it wasn't a terribly long stretch to Stevens Pass from Snoqualmie Pass, and we figured we could get at least one night of camping in before the rain started back up and everything got soaked.  We crossed the Catwalk, where we had just enough visibility to take a few pictures, and then hiked into the night to take advantage of the break in the weather.  

The catwalk in the fog

Dancin' on the catwalk

Hippie Longstocking on the catwalk

Trying to catwalk on the catwalk

In the morning we got up early and packed up our gear, and we actually managed to get started walking before the precipitation began.  We headed uphill and were quickly high enough that it was snow and not rain, which was fine.

The snow starts...

Fresh snow

However, we only walked through the snow for a short time before beginning a long descent the precipitation went from being dry and fluffy to being my old friend, near-freezing rain.  Within a few hours we were soaked, and the trail was heading back up above the snowline, where all of our wet clothes would freeze.  Hippie had hiked the trail before and knew about a lower-elevation alternate trail.  It began as the Pete Lakes trail, which branched off from the PCT shortly ahead of us.  It then went over Wapatu Pass, which was lower elevation than the pass the PCT traversed, and we hoped it would keep us below the snowline.  Right before the turnoff we ran into Sweet Tooth and Hot Tub, a couple that I'd known since southern California when they'd met and gotten together on the trail.  They decided to join us for the alternate, and the four of us set off from the PCT.  It turned out to be a good decision, as Wapatu pass was below the snowline and we were all pretty cold even on that.

Looking up at the snow on higher peaks while taking the Pete Lake/Wapatu Pass route

Hot Tub and Sweet Tooth

Hot Tub and Sweet Tooth had good waterproof gear but Hippie and I didn't, and the two of us were soon so wet that it wasn't worth it to take off our shoes and socks for creek fordings.  Taking them off meant sitting down long enough to start shaking, then crossing a cold creek, and then sitting down again to put them back on.  On the other hand, if we just plowed through we didn't get much wetter than we were before, and we never had to sit still and lose the body heat generated by our movement.

Hippie crossing a river the same way I just had, wading through in her shoes and all of her clothes

The visibility got worse...

...and worse.

The others stopped somewhere along the way and camped but I just couldn't stop moving, dreading the cold that would overtake me if I stopped for even a minute.  When it got dark I finally stopped and pitched my tent as quickly as I could, satisfied that I could at least make it into Skykomish the following evening and would only have to put my wet clothes back on the next morning and not the one after as well.  I was actually fine at night - I'd carried a heavier bag (a women's 15-degree down bag) and sleeping pad (a NeoAir inflatable but the thicker, silver-colored one meant for sleeping on snow) all through the desert because I've slept cold my entire life.  I'd appreciated them then when it was still freezing at night, and I appreciated them even more now.  The problem was being out of the sleeping bag.  In the desert it had been only ever been cold at night and had never rained, so I hadn't realized how woefully unprepared I was to actually hike in weather until recently, and I'd been slow to react.

In the morning I forced myself into my wet clothes and set off, caring only about reaching Highway 2 and getting into town.

The creek coming out of this canyon was a bit of a challenge...

After that I dropped down into a valley

At one point the trail actually became a small stream.

However, I was making slow enough time that it soon became clear I wouldn't make it the entire way to the highway that day, at least not in the light when I'd still be able to hitchhike to shelter.  Hippie had talked the day before about possibly taking a trail out to Deception Pass to get out sooner, but my navigation app didn't say how far away it met the highway, and I didn't have any other source of information.  There was a trail called the Surprise Creek Trail, though, and my app said that it ran four miles out to a trailhead near the highway.  The turnoff was about 15 miles before the PCT hit the highway, meaning it would shave at more than ten miles off of my hike for the day, and make sure I had enough time to get into town.  All the Guthook's app said was "The Surprise Creek Trail continues north from the PCT along Surprise Creek, heading to a trailhead near Highway 2 about 4 miles away."  I had no more information than that and no way to navigate once off the PCT but Guthook had been accurate in the past, so I trusted him and went down the steep side trail.

The Surprise Creek trail was trickier and was steep enough that my going was much slower even than it had been for the first mile or so, but it gradually got easier as I descended.  There weren't any stunning views on the trail, and this was the only picture I took:

I love it when a bridge washes out and they're just like "screw it, just throw a log across."

It did meet the road as Guthook had promised, and I made it there in the early afternoon.  The Iron Goat Trailhead was very close by and I thought getting a ride into town would be a breeze, but I had another thought coming.  A man sat in his car in the parking lot, but when I approached he wouldn't roll the window down more than two inches to talk to me.  He wasn't headed in the direction of Skykomish, nor were the couple looking at the informational displays in the parking lot.  I stood on the highway trying to hitch and two women pulled out from the trailhead parking lot and turned towards Skykomish, turning around so as not to make eye contact with me as they did.  Car after car sped by me as I stood there with my thumb out, shaking harder and harder in my soaking wet clothes.  I was sobbing by the time a car stopped, and a young hiker sprang out of the passenger door.  He took my pack and my poles from me, and stuffed them into the trunk.  He was a southbound section hiker and the car's driver, Joseph, had stopped for him back where the PCT intersected the highway.  He headed back to the front passenger seat, and I opened the door behind him.  The seats of the car looked very clean, and very light in color.  I was soaking wet and filthy, and suddenly afraid to sit on those seats.  

"I'm going to mess up the seat," I stammered, my teeth chattering.  Joseph looked at me with a kind face.

"Yes, that's the way it works.  Get in the car."  

I dove in and he cranked up the heat, and soon I wasn't crying or even shivering.  Joseph lived in Monroe and was a hiker himself, and the three of us talked about hiking and about hitchhiking and about the weather and probably about other things too, I can't remember exactly.  He dropped me in Skykomish, as I requested, and I quietly swore to myself that once I had a car again I would pick up hitchhikers in need in his name.