Good News, Bad News and Thanks!

Hello all - Sideshow here, checking in from Sierra City, CA. It's a small old mining town at the north end of the Sierra Mountains. If you want a view of the scenery, get out the Google and point it towards Sierra Buttes - we hiked around them in order to get down to the town yesterday. Ugly pointed out that it looks like Mt. Doom, from Lord of the Rings, so of course the hobbit comparisons started up.

So far the trail has been good, if a bit snow covered. The good news - we've been making it through alright and on schedule, despite the 10-20ft snow cover in places. It's been absolutely beautiful, but unfortunately I can't upload any pictures here, so you're just going to have to take my word for it.

Part of the reason we've been doing so well is all the packages and mail we keep getting when we stop into town! Wow! Thank you all so much for all the food and kind words you've sent. Ugly and I have enjoyed every bit of it!

Well, we've met Ugly's mom, Stephanie and little brother, Daniel here, and it's been great hanging out with them. We have a beautiful campsite right out of town on a nice creek. It's good they're here, because.... The bad news:

Ugly and I are tired of snow. It's been a very late year, so the amount of snow on the trail has been way more than expected. At this point, without the desire or equipment to battle the snow that we know is waiting for us as we get higher into the Sierras, we are taking a (short) break.

We'll be driving up more north for a couple more days of rest with Ugly's family, before getting on the train again and heading down further south, to Yosemite, to hike the John Muir Trail. We planned to get there in two weeks anyway, but we are choosing to wait a bit for more snow to melt, and to cut off a portion of the snowier bits. Ultimately, our mileage total will be a bit less (500+ instead of the original 760 miles), but one thing that both Ugly and I realized on this last section, was that we aren't mileage hikers. Maybe that means I'll never thru-hike the whole PCT, but I'm okay with that. One added bonus of our taking this break - we'll be giving ourselves a whole 3-3.5 weeks to complete the 200 miles of the JMT, instead of the original 2, giving us the chance to slow down, enjoy the scenery more, and (hopefully) go swimming in every accessible body of water we pass.

Short anecdotes from the previous section:

-Saw a mountain lion! Skulking around our tent in the evening! Whoa!

-Met more hikers - including our first thru-hiker: The Conductor.

-Saw two rattlesnakes! They rattled at us, but immediately moved off the trail away from us.

Well - Ugly or I might post again before we get on the trail again, but we'll see what happens down the road. Right now we are healthy and happy, and hope you are as well!

love,

Sideshow.

Woke up on snow at 7000 ft yesterday. Got to belden to find an electronica festival going on. They let us in for free. Strange but fun. We hit trail tomorrow.

Taking a rest day in Belden. Lots of snow so far on the trail which has made navigation tough. 5. GPS has been essential at times.

In Old Station, CA!

Sideshow checking out our route down from Grizzly Peak. MMMM Snow!

Sideshow's pinky toe blister, last night, pre-lancing

Ugly says:
So we're nine hiking days into the trip and we're crashing for the night in Old Station, CA! We've hiked approximately 130 miles so far. We had a rest day in Burney Falls State Park around three days ago after passing through one of the most challenging sections of trail I have ever encountered. The first two days were plagued by incredible downfall across the trail. Full grown firs had been snapped clean in half over the course of the winter and it seemed every single one of them landed on the trail. And while we were climbing over and crawling under hundreds of these trees, it was pouring rain. All in all the first two days of the trip were pretty rough. On the third day (June 5, I think) we got a slight reprieve. The rain stopped, we passed through the last of the downfall and and got a chance to dry out a little bit. Then we put in the longest day of the trip so far. We hiked around 18 miles, nearly 15 of them over snow, before finding a snowy spot to camp well after dark. The goods new from all that is we have had ample opportunity to test out all of or rain gear and warm layers and so far so good. We hear more snow lying in wait for us as we head south toward the Sierras, We have had sunny, warm weather for the past five days and we hope it will stick around as we make our way down the trail!

Sideshow Says:
We're staying right now at Firefly and Firewalker's house in Old Station. They are two trail angels, who we already benefited from up on a dry stretch of trail above town - they maintain a water cache for hikers, with shade and camp chairs to take a break at. Now, we ran into them in town, and we're spending the night with them. They have an amazing trail camp at their house. They host tons of hikers - there was already one guy here when we got here, and they are expecting 11 or 12 more tonite! Holy cow!
Well, my feet are tired, but I'm doing great, especially now that we're here. We've got a long way to go, but it's been great so far!

On the train to Mt Shasta! We arrive in an hour and a half. We'll pick up the trail tomorrow morning!

The penultimate post!

So if you guys are sick of hearing about us planning and packing for the trip, I promise, we're about a hundred times sicker of planning and packing for the trip. But here's our second to last post before we hit the trail (tomorrow you can expect photos of us sporting our trail haircuts and photos of our completely packed packs!

We took all of our boxes off to the Post Office today. We shipped off 11 boxes in total. We shipped the box to our first pick up point last Friday to be sure it would get there on time. We have yet to ship our buckets to Muir Ranch because we haven't gotten a big enough bucket yet. They charge $50 a bucket no matter what size, so my awesome parents are going to get us a big old 10 gallon bucket to put all of our stuff in.

We also have our packs packed and ready to go. The packs seem to have gotten heavier, as they are apt to do. We're both weighing in at around 23 lbs before food and water, and around 35lbs with 6 days worth of food and 2 liters of water. Still pretty manageable and I expect the few comfort items we are carrying along will be much appreciated along the way.

We catch our train to Dunsmuir, Ca at around 2:30pm tomorrow afternoon and arrive at around midnight. We will find our way to the trail the next morning and then the fun begins!