Made it Halfway!

I made it to Old Station, mile 1375, in time to meet Alicia there! Getting that far down the trail was actually easier than I had thought it would be. A couple days after leaving Truckee I realized I needed to slow down a bit or I would get to Old Station over a day early. That is a much better problem to have than the other way, but also a bit surprising. It turns out it wasn't too hard for me to do over 25 miles a day consistently and I was pretty good at going into town for a food resupply and still doing 20 miles of hiking in the same day.

This blog entry is going to be a bit short, I didn't write it before getting to town and I don't have a lot of time, but I figured I should put up something.

The last 150 miles have been relatively uneventful. I did hit the official halfway point for miles. Hopefully, the second half takes a bit less time than the first half. There won't be another section like the Sierras to slow me down so it should be pretty straightforward to get the miles done. 

One of the more interesting parts of the last few days was hiking through Lassen Volcanic National Park. There is quite a bit of geothermal activity there and I decided, since I was in the area, I should take the short side trail down to Terminal Geyser. This isn't an actual geyser, unfortunately, but it is a fumarole. There is a steam vent that a stream runs over making the stream water hot and generating a fairly impressive steam cloud.

Besides some general nice mountain views the last noteworthy event of this section was when I hiked down into the "town" of Belden. This is a small mountain resort that frequently has events take over the whole place. The PCT happens to run directly through the resort so when there are events in town, the event always has some bonus unwashed hikers hanging out around the edges.

When I walked in it was the first day of a weekend long electronic music festival, basically a rave in the woods. I was only there for a few hours but it was a bit shocking seeing all of the people there. I hiked out of there in the mid afternoon and did seven miles uphill to get away from the crowds. When I woke up at 4 A.M. I could hear the music in my tent. From the stories of people that camped closer, the party was going strong until about 7 A.M. It was hard to get a photo of the event, but I tried to capture it a bit with a shot of the beach stage.

Lastly, here is a slightly different video compared to my previous ones. It is a bit longer than my others but I figured it might be interesting. I did notice that I need to become better at talking throughout the whole video. More practice is what I need I guess.