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!

We're up on SPOT!

Alright, here's the link you all have been waiting for! We're up on Google Maps! You will be able to follow our progress as we head down the trail. If you want to see the topography click on the "terrain" button in the upper right hand corner.

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/gogl.jsp?glId=0D29GqVexYCqK01Fp7tntdo7vb5FlDg4b

Almost there... plus 760 miles

It might sound hard to believe, but after all this planning, I'm actually looking forward to hiking as the easy part. We'll see what I say after a few weeks of 15 mile days.

So here's the rundown of things we have left to do: Our resupply boxes are almost complete. We have around 6 USPS flatrate boxes, 2 Bearvault BV500 canisters, and a 5 gallon bucket all being sent to various locations along the way. We have already packed our food, fuel, batteries, and toiletries that we will need along the way. We printed our maps (over 100 pages of them) on Rite in the Rain waterproof paper and they are currently at Kinkos getting spiral bound. We will be adding them to the various corresponding resupply boxes when we get them back tomorrow. From there we have to tape all those boxes up and truck them over to the Post Office.

We are approaching this trip with a "light" mentality. Not ultralight--we're not leaving the tent and hiking boots at home-- but we're not going "traditional" either. Our base back weight (before food and water) are each around 17lbs. With 9 days of food and the bear vaults, they will be between 35-40lbs. We will only have one section of 9 days (between Echo Lake and Tualomne Meadows) so we should be averaging around 30 lbs for most of the trip.

Oh yeah, and here are some photos of us with our fully packed bear vaults!