Day 81 (10 August)

Miles 1219.7 to 1239.5. A-Tree Spring camp to bushcamp.

A hilly day awaits us today, but the biggest climb is the first one and thus we decide to get up early to conquer it early in the morning and before it gets hot. The others are also awake but look like they are in no rush. So we take off by ourselves. We make good time and soon reach the top. Today is pleasant enough, no smoky skies, pretty views and we are in good spirits. We keep seeing Sweatheart who takes her breaks with us, but neither Flamin Hot nor Sarah catch up with us. We hope they are fine, Flamin Hot having knee issues and Sarah having complained about her Achilles heel all day yesterday. We speculate that she will likely leave the trail at the road to Quincy and that Flamin Hot has slowed down to keep her company and will eventually catch up.

We spend most of the day hiking up and down (so no news there) and mostly in the woods (no news here either). It‘s actually quite cool in the shade of the trees and we are almost happy when we get to climb up somewhere so we get warm again.

What we‘ve seen of Northern California has been really nice. Maybe not as unknown and astonishing as the dessert or as spectacular as the Sierras, but the scenery here definitely has its own charm. Unfortunately we have had some hazy days due to the smoke of the wildfires around and don‘t always get to see all NorCal has to offer. But also, there is a thing called the NorCal blues and it is starting to affect us, too. We feel the length of time we have been on trail now, we know what still lies ahead of us, through social media and messaging we know where other hikers are at the moment and where we should actually be too (if we hadn‘t gone to Europe), and all this comes with an uneasy feeling. We should do more miles a day. We should get up earlier and hike until late. Do less zeroes. Hurry up! Which we don‘t want to do, but let‘s face it - Canada is still far away, and WINTER IS COMING. Eventually. Not today. Not next week. But next month maybe. In Washington you never know.

We climb our last mountain for about a mile and decide to call it a day after 20 miles exactly. We have actually discussed for a few days now that we should be stepping up our game and start doing 20+ mile days now. So we are going to try to do a few 20s and then gradually increase our daily mileage. This way in about two to three weeks we should manage 25 miles (40km) a day and possibly more in the weeks to come. We are after all pretty much the last hikers out here going NOBO and we feel the pressure to do miles each day. It‘s not a great feeling and one thing we can do about it is increasing the daily mileage. So let‘s give it a try in the next couple days!