Day 87 – Saturday, Aug. 19

PCT Mile 1,416.5, Burney Falls State Park to PCT Mile 1,434.4
Day Total: 17.9 miles

I'm going to start with the end of the day. That was the most memorable part and not for any good reasons.

Tonight after we set up the tent, we were making dinner as usual. Just as Stephen was taking the pot full of dinner (Spanish rice) off the stove, I saw a huge ant crawling up my hand and about to go into my sleeve, so I flung it.

But I also, without realizing, gasped and that spooked Stephen, causing him to spill half of our precious dinner.

 I felt like a doofus.

It was an ant!

We've been living outside for almost three months and I freaked out about an ant on my hand.

Regardless, my freakout caused Stephen to spill dinner.

We were in a bad situation. We were down half of our dinner of course, but more importantly, we also had a pile of Spanish rice on the ground in bear country.

It was dark. Do we pack everything up and move?

We decided to clean it up the best we could and stay put. Stephen, resourceful as always, used our poop trowel to clean up the dirt-covered rice and throw it into the woods away from the tent.

 If you're reading this, I've survived the night.

We refer to this evening as the Spanish Rice Incident. Stephen said this isn't something we can joke about for at least a couple years.

He is very hungry. He has compared this to how long it took until Lincoln "hole-in-the-head" jokes became funny.

As for the day up until this point, we slept in late, knowing we had to wait for our package to be delivered. The forced rest time was actually kind of nice.

Fortunately, the package arrived at 10 a.m., so we organized and split up the food and hiked out.

The trail was hot, but we were able to swim at lunch in Rock Creek. From there, the rest of the day was uphill, mostly in the trees. The trail was severely overgrown in places, forcing us to bushwhack through thick greenery.

We had to cross a lot of logging roads. Bad trail conditions, dirt roads, and a lack of views are the things we had heard about Northern California, and today had all of those things.

With the Spanish Rice Incident still fresh, I'm going to sleep now. Or trying to. Every time I hear a rustling in the bushes, I spring up and shine my headlamp on the huge, scary, evil... chipmunk.

Hopefully we don't see any bigger creatures tonight.

One more note, we've started to read about wildfires in Northern California and Oregon that are causing closures along the PCT. We're hoping things will be better by the time we're there, but it looks like the challenges of the trail this year aren't exclusive to the snow in the Sierras.