Mile 2368 to 2390
As expected, we woke to rain. Hooray! We were treated to some hot chocolate after stuffing our wet tents (which become absurdly heavy) into their bags. Roger, our trail angel from Seattle, had reinforced his three awnings and had quite an impressive setup. It was hard to leave, but we had hiking to do!
A few miles down the track, which was basically a compilation of puddles plenty deep enough to seep over the sides of my shoes, we crossed a dirt road where Theresa, another trail angel, had just pulled up her SUV. Seeing that we were in for a wet day, she got up early and came out with homemade bread. Huckleberry, zucchini, zucchini and walnut, banana and apple (picked from her front yard, of course). Two trail angels in one day!? How fantastic. Again, after twenty minutes and a soggy selfie, we set off in the steady rain once more.
Not a half mile later, we came upon two more awnings… trail angels. Is this real life? Honey Bee and Stumbling Norwegian, two thru hikers from previous years had seen the weather predicted for the weekend and decided to come out to give us hikers a little break. Starting to see a pattern here? We felt a little bad as we weren’t that hungry and honestly a bit cold from not hiking much. We settled for hot chocolate with a shot of whisky in it and shirked off again, declining eggs, bacon, beer, cookies, and chips.
[Soggy morning face; Trail Angel Theresa; Hawkeyes hands on the top, mine on bottom... disgusting; we made it to the hotel room!; our mad dash to the hot tub]
When it’s raining, there is nothing to do but hike. You don’t take any breaks to put your feet up. You don’t spend a minute here or there to take a picture or mull over a trail sign. I don’t listen to podcasts or music for fear of getting my phone wet. You just hike. So, we hiked. No hour long lunch break, we just pulled our hoods down tighter and ate some bars.
The day dragged on, and we became increasingly cold as water soaked us. Our rain gear can protect us for a bit, but hours and hours of non-stop rain will find its way in. Our only solace was that we were headed into town, and the hotel in Snoqualmie had a hot tub. Hot tub, the only words we could speak for the last few hours of the day.
We finally rolled into town around four, and after ditching our bags in the room, tottered down to the hot tub in our bare feet and water logged shorts. Simply glorious! While we soaked, my parents had returned from a shopping expedition and went a little crazy hanging all of our wet gear (which was quite literally everything) all over the room to dry. We came back to the room to find a quite comical scene.
The all day rain was brutal, but it taught us a few lessons. For one, if it rains all day, everything, even the stuff inside the trash bag that is meant to keep your stuff dry, will be wet. Noted. The other takeaway is that you will get wet, even with rain gear. I have now decided what can, and cannot, get wet so that I still have enough clothes in the evening to stay warm at night.
We’re now glued to the weather report and hoping to luck out over the next week or two. This is my master plan for staying relatively dry and comfortable, we’ll see how it pans out!
