Day 21 (123)

Miles: 24.6

Mileage: 2,566.5

There’s something wrong with our food. Last year when planning our food drops, I gathered store-bought dinners and just sent them to us out on the trail. While they were plenty caloric, Richard requested something with a little more variety of pallet. So this year I took the store bought dinners and used them as a base to build off of. To them I added textured vegetable protein, garlic powder and dried vegetables. It seems the dried veggies are mainly carrots, sweet corn and onions. The garlic and onions are tasty but doing a number to our digestive tracts. Everything is still functioning, but the problem is the increase in flatulence. Both Richard and I are farting constantly and they are especially odorous. We have three more dinners to go and then I am giving up dried onions for the rest of my life.

Even though we’d had rain and cooler weather the last 36 hours, today was back to classic Washington; dry, sunny and warm.

All this sunshine certainly does show off the mountains.

We passed the 100-miles-to-go mark mid morning, which was exciting. It was near the top of our long climb for the day.

It has occurred to me that people might not understand what I mean when I say long up or long down hills. For the PCT, a long ascent or descent takes hours. For example, this morning our long up was 3,500 feet of elevation gain over nearly nine miles. We walked uphill for over three hours.

The afternoon was spent on an even longer downhill. The trail is not really dirt. It’s mostly an inch or so of dust. My shoes are gaping with holes, so it goes right through them and my socks onto my feet. Each day when I take off my shoes, my feet are brown. Luckily, there’s so much water in Washington, that I’ve been able to clean them in a nearby stream or lake almost every night.