This marks our fifth straight day of rain. I thought, most of the day today, that we might actually get lucky and be coming to the end of the wet spell we’ve been having; it didn’t rain at all during the day today, although everything around us was still really, really wet most of the time. But then, this evening, just after we made camp, it started coming down again…and so I’m typing this, listening to the rain patter down on the tarp above. It’s kind of a neat feeling to be warm and dry while it rains outside, truth be told, except that the knowledge that we’ll have to go outside again tomorrow morning makes it decidedly less fun.
It’s possible we’ve had more rain in the last five days than we did for the entire rest of this trip combined, and that’s obviously really saying something — both about how wet it’s been recently and about how lucky we were to get so little rain beforehand. Once again, as long as it helps put out the wildfires that are all over this state, I’m more than happy to put up with it…but also once again, it sucks hiking in the rain.
The effects of this weather can be kind of cool, though: we woke up this morning literally in a cloud. It’d come in overnight and enveloped the high ridge where we’d made camp, and looking out into it from the tarp in the morning was pretty amazing. (I’ll also appreciate it because I couldn’t see any of the no-doubt-amazing views that would’ve been there had the weather been clear.) Several times during the day today, we had that same effect, as clouds moved in and filled the tops of the trees with that same beautiful mist.
Early this morning, we came around a bend in the trail, and who should we see but — Hedgehog! We were fairly surprised to catch up with her, since she’s usually considerably faster than us, but then she explained that she’d stayed in her tent until 10:30 AM the past couple of days (lucky woman!) to hide from the rain and the damp. She and Treeman are hiking separately for about a week around here, largely because she’d never actually spent a night in the woods alone before and wanted to have the experience. She took off soon enough and was out of sight, as expected, but it was a really pleasant surprise to run into her.
These Washington woods are beautiful and lush, although I’m eager to see farther and to check out more of the spectacular views that this state is known for on the PCT. I suppose I’m just going to have to wait for the weather to clear for that, though…and who knows how long that could be? I won’t hold my breath, and, in the mean time, we’ll just soldier on.
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