The End

We left Stehekin, after loading up on bakery food, with a big group of people. We got hiking and were moving at a really good pace. A bit later into the day I came around a corner to find my friends, Sad Fish and Shutter, helping a man up from a creek crossing.  Nothing looked wrong at first until I noticed the man's sopping wet clothes and Sad Fish told me about a large gash on the back of his head. Being a wilderness first responder,  I jumped into action and started to check out the man's wounds. He was very lucky to only have minor injuries from the fall that he took. He did not have a concussion and the head wound had already stopped bleeding. I cleaned him up and told him to get some dry clothes on. Luckily he had a friend with him so I sent them on their way and told him to see someone when the got into town early the next day. We made it to camp after the ordeal and had a nice dinner together, chatting about how close we were to the end. We were lazy the next morning and didn't get out of camp till ten, which meant night hiking again. The next day we had a bunch of miles to make up for the day before so we began our last marathon day.  It was very cold all day and we night hiked into camp. Apparently we arrived ten minutes after a bear had come through, losing our last chance to see a bear on the trip. We went to bed feeling giddy, knowing tomorrow we would walk across the border into Canada. Suddenly on the last day, we ran into a ton of people. Some I hadn't seen since the desert(they had caught up by hitching around areas mostly). We moved fast and the excitement was palpable.  A mile from the border I started to get a very weird feeling in the pit of my stomach. I thought "this is it. In 20 minutes I'll have completed this journey I never thought I would finish." Instead of being ecstatic,  I felt incredibly bittersweet. Was I ready for this all to be over? To leave the people I've spent my life with everyday for months? I wasn't ready. As I walked up and saw the monument in view, a small part of me wanted to turn around. There was a large group who cheered and I was welcomed with a large Sad Fish hug. I touched the monument and let out a sigh of relief. I had made it. 2,660 miles in five months and five days. A couple minutes later, the rest of our group came in and it finally felt right. We hung out at the monument for hours, taking pictures and reading the final trail register. We camped close by and made it the nine miles put to a town the next morning.  We ran into our final piece of trail magic as we hit the road and enjoyed a glass of champagne. Through everything, hiking the Pacific Crest trail was the best decision I have ever made with my life. If you've ever had an inkling to do it, DO IT! You won't regret it. Just put one foot in front of the other.

Snoqualmie to Skykomish to Stehekin

We left Snoqualmie Pass and headed for Skykomish. What we didn't know was that this section was covered in thick vegetation with no possible camp spots so we walked late into the night to find anything that could work.  The next day was my friend, Top Shelf ' s birthday so we took it easy for most of the day. Heading into camp alone in the dark, I rounded a bend and came upon a pair of green eyes reflecting in my headlamp. I was frozen with fear thinking this must be a bear or mountain lion waiting to attack me .3 miles from camp. I began to make noise and hit my trekking poles together but the eyes didn't move. I sat there for another ten minutes before the eyes turned and I got a glimpse of a small brown tail poking up. It had been an elk the entire time. I made it to camp that night just before it started raining and shared my embarrassing flirt with death. The next day we were moving fast to get into Skykomish and did 21.5 miles before 4. But not before a rough creek crossing where Smokey and I both took hard falls on the slick rock. Luckily we avoided the freezing cold water. After getting to town, we took an unplanned zero to put off the "hardest section in washington" as we had been told. We had mice issues every night for the rest of the trip after leaving. We also passed many weekend hikers taking naps or hanging out and we realized how nice it must be to really enjoy this place. Unfortunately winter was coming and we had to move on. The next morning the sky was a mix of pink and gray as massive bolts of lightning struck down close by. It started to rain and since we had decided to cowboy camp the night before, we all shot out of bed and threw everything in our bags before the downpour occured. It rained off and on all day until the afternoon when it seemed to clear up. We hung out on top of a beautiful pass waiting for everyone to get there when we had a brilliant idea. All of us being in our mid 20 ' s, the most mature thing we could do was make a ton of rock sculptures that resembled dicks. I'm not proud of it but it was one of the funniest things I had seen on trail. We made it a bit farther to camp by a lake. Even before it got dark, we saw two small mice running rampant around the site (which might have been due to the large bag of garbage we found hidden under a rock. Bad, bad weekenders). The guys began throwing rocks to scare them away, but they were not deterred. That is, until Smokey hit one. We all peeked over as we saw the small mouse twitching and immobile.  It was then we had realized what we had done and what we needed to do. We looked away as a larger rock was thrown on top of the mouse,  hopefully killing him instantly. We felt remorse until about three in the morning when the other mouse came back for vengence. I was awake most of the night hitting my backpack from inside the tent to scare him off. By six, I had wished we had killed both of them. Tired from no sleep we woke up to the hardest day we would have for the rest of the trip.  There were two massive climbs we would have to get through that day so we got moving.  Just before the first climb, I went down to the river to fill up my water bottle. I was almost there when I slipped and fell straight into a nettle bush. I walked back up to the group with hives covering my arms and legs.  They weren't suprised. It started to rain so we decided it was time to get it over with. We moved quickly up the first climb and were rewarded with a seven mile downhill stretch.  We got to an alternate route that used to be the old PCT and decided to take it instead even though the signs warned us that it was not a maintained trail. In my mind, I thought, how bad could it be? The next two miles of the alternate took us over an hour and across two very dangerous river crossings.  We made it back to the PCT at six, to the base of the second, eight mile long climb. We hiked till 9:30 as fast as we could go in the rain to make it over the climb. We needed to get that far to get into town the next day by three to catch a shuttle. It poured down rain on us all night, so we awoke in a four foot puddle that made the tent feel like a water bed. We had to make it 20 miles into town and I hiked faster than I had since my injury, making it in at 2:45. Stehekin is a town that is only accessible by ferry, plane, or hiking in. A shuttle picked us up from the trail and took us down into the main part of town which had the best bakery and organic farm I had ever been to. We took another zero day to dry out all of our wet gear and rest up for the last 193 miles of our trip to the Canadian border.