Miles: 796.5 | A slow morning in Glasgow leads to an unsteady hike back out, marked by exhaustion, lingering pain, and another wave of doubt. The foggy climbs feel heavy, but steady support from Miles keeps the day from unraveling completely. Punch Bowl Shelter offers an early stop, shelter from the rain, and an unexpected soundtrack of peeping tree frogs. Conversations with section hikers spark reflection on mindset, expectations, and why some people stop—and why we keep going. A soggy, frustrating bear hang caps the night, but warmth, safety, and nearing 800 miles provide just enough grounding to reset.
We stayed in town til noon. We stopped at the gas station and got some Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches. There weren't many options in town. Fanny Panther, who had showed up late the night before, and his friend (who was section hiking with him and had a car) gave us a ride back to the trailhead around noon. We started hiking out of town.
I had a mental breakdown two miles in...again. I was still tired. My body still hurt. My hiker legs were virtually non-existent. I thought maybe I was getting sick, again. I didn't know what to do. Miles said, "Every day can't be like this." I knew that. And it didn't want every day to be like this. But I was miserable. And I didn't want to be miserable. I usually loved hiking and wanted to walk and it usually got better after a few miles. I still really, honestly, did not like camping, though. It didn't matter how much I told myself otherwise: I missed my bed and my shower and my cats. I called my doctor and got voicemail. I asked if I shouldn't get a blood test, maybe I had Lyme disease?
After I left the message I started to calm down. I stopped crying. Miles stayed with me the whole day. I didn't have a lot of motivation and he really helped me get through it. We got to the top of our first climb. There was a small monument up there.
The air was misty and foggy. It was eerie. The impending rain clouds made the sky dark. We hustled out of there.
We got to Punch Bowl Shelter around 6pm. Walking down the trail to the shelter we were immediately greeted by tree frogs. Hundreds of peeping tree frogs! They were quite loud but we didn't really feel like going any further and rain was coming. When we got down to the shelter we met Hippie King, a section hiker heading southbound toward a Rainbow Gathering, and an older section hiker from Alabama who didn't have a trail name (we'll just call him Alabama for now). Miles and I set up in the shelter, we didn't feel like dealing with the tent and the shelter was nearly empty with everyone at Trail Days.
We talked to Hippie King over dinner about his experiences so far. He seemed really positive. He'd only been on the trail for two weeks! It's hard to imagine now how it felt in my first two weeks. It feels like I was a whole other person back then!
We talked to Alabama when he got back from getting water. He told us he was out just for a 10 day 150 mile stretch with some old friends of his. They were camping 3 miles further south, he couldn't keep up with him and he decided to camp here. He realized that day that he wanted to just go home. It was his first day out. He used to take his kids for weekend trips. But that was back in the day, he told us. He didn't see the novelty in camping anymore. He was retired and he didn't want to work so hard! He decided he would go home the next day at the next road gap. He would still have to walk 10 more miles to get there.
Miles and I discussed Alabama's situation later. It wasn't his outdated gear and heavy pack, his friends who might've been in better shape, or even his age that stopped him and discouraged him. No, perhaps backpacking wasn't for him anymore despite the fact that he used to love it. What stopped him was his mind and his planning.
His friends and him decided to do 150 miles in 10 days. For anyone who hasn't been hiking 8-10 hours a day with 20+ pounds (for him 40+ pounds) on their backs for a couple weeks already, this would be a hard transition from a mostly sedentary lifestyle! That's 15 miles per day every day, over moderate terrain, with 40-50 pounds on your back, in leather, boots, in the rain. He was telling himself (while his legs burned like they hadn't in years, sweat dripped down his face, and his wife sat idly at home watching TV) that he was miserable and that this was too hard and that he had worked too long and hard to be putting up with this.
He didn't retire to work more. He wasn't happy because of his mindset. Backpacking wasn't fun for him anymore because he no longer possessed the same perspective as he did before. I felt sad for him and thankful that I had Miles to show me how great this world of backpacking can be even when I want to go home sometimes. Another section hiker, teaching me a lesson.
Miles offered to hang the bear bags because it was raining and he's quicker at it. He left to go hang the line while I finished my dinner. 45 minutes later he came back. The sun was mostly set. "I found the best bear bag tree!" He told me.
We finished our dinners and I offered to help him hoist them because they were a bit heavy right out of town. We started into the woods with our bags. I brought my bear line rope just in case. We kept walking up a path past some campsites that were empty. The trail ended and he kept walking into the dark woods. I turned my headlamp on. "Where are we going" I asked him as the rain kept falling. My socks were getting wet. I was only wearing Crocs and the terrain went from an easy trail to underbrush.
15 minutes later we were nearby the tree he hung the line from. We looked around with the headlamp and finally found it. It was 8:30pm, it was raining, my socks were wet. "Why did you hang it all the way out here?" I asked him ungratefully. He said it was the best tree he could find. I knew he was trying to be helpful but we had passed hundreds of trees on our way here. We were in the dark, rainy woods away from the path and the shelter where we could get lost and where I was getting wet.
We clipped the bags to the line and tried to hoist them into the tree. The line wouldn't budge. The line was wet and the bags might have been slightly heavy and the rope wouldn't slide over the tree limb. By now I was so annoyed.
I took my bag off the line and went to hang my own bear bag. We hung them traditional style (more likely to get taken by bears than the PCT method) because we couldn't find any strong enough sticks to hold the bags on the line properly. They were all soaked from the four days of rain we'd had. We walked back toward the shelter and almost an hour later were back and crawling into bed.
We were lulled to sleep by the peepers. I hadn't done this in a while but I felt like my negativity was a bit pervasive this day so I decided to start again... 3 Positives / Thankfuls:
- Miles helped me through my mental breakdown.
- We are almost to 800 miles!
- I am warm.