I awoke to watch the sun rise behind Mount Shasta through the door of my tent, still wrapped in my sleeping bag against the cold mountain air. Soon after I began my hike for the day I was surprised to see Vick nonchalantly sitting on a rock on the side of the trail. Instead of being ahead of me as I had thought, he and Ronan had actually been following behind me for the entire previous day, trying to catch up with me while I was (mistakenly, as it turned out) rushing to try to catch them! I was glad to see him again, and when Ronan appeared a few minutes later we happily set off again together toward the north.
In the mid-afternoon we ran into a hiker that Vick and Ronan knew from their time in the desert section. He had skipped ahead by car from Kennedy Meadows back in June to avoid the snow in the Sierras, and was now heading back south to complete the sections he had missed. Flip flopping, as this practice is known among thru-hikers, was very common in 2019 due to the very high snow levels that year (although it is technically not allowed by the rules of the PCT permit, especially in the popular High Sierra). Some day hikers had given him a giant bag of peanut butter M&Ms and he graciously shared them with us while we chatted.
It began to sprinkle rain as we descended toward the remote Highway 3 in the Trinity Mountains. An eerily deserted campground lay just off the road, and we had our choice of sites to set up for the night. The rain fell harder as we cooked dinner at a picnic table under a fir tree. I soon crawled into my tent to escape the deluge, but unfortunately my tent’s design had a major flaw which led water to seep in near the head. Exhausted from the day’s hike I quickly fell asleep anyway, too tired to worry about the wetness until the morning.
Russell on the Road 