Days 101
Start: Dunsmuir, CA
Finish: Mount Shasta, CA
Daily Mileage: 0
PCT Mile: 1502.3
Zero day today since we got into town early yesterday. Doc drove us to Mount Shasta where we finished our town chores.
It’s the 4th of July and town was crowded with people coming out for the annual parade down main street. We stowed our packs at the outfitter and grabbed beers for the parade. Hikers gathered at the burger place which is pretty typical.
The parade was nice and had that hometown feel to it with many random people just driving down the street. No floats but the real show of force was by Cal Fire with their trucks and even a tractor trailer pulling a massive bulldozer. Our real heroes with a big fire growing right ahead on trail.
Fittingly, we grabbed Indian food for dinner and headed to our hotel for the night to relax and prepare for the next stretch of trail.
My main focus is the Shelly Fire 100 miles ahead. The trail is closed and the fire is growing. We want to get as far as we can, hopefully to Etna Summit where the closure starts at mile 1600.8. 19 miles of trail is closed, and I’ve looked at multiple alternate ways to hike around it. I’ve hiked a continuous footpath to this point, and don’t see reason to stop yet. We have been hiking hard to try to stay ahead of the fires, but alas they are here, especially with the heat wave not helping anything.
We are heading back to the mountains tomorrow to see what happens.
Got a new pair of kicks today 600 miles on the old ones which turned out to be a bit much since I was really feeling the rocky trail with the foam soles in the trail runners breaking down. I had to get the normal width instead of wide since wide was not available anywhere on the internet. Hopefully they will work well enough. Used them for one month and they are completely shot which is normal out here.
