Mile Marker: 1599.7
Trail Miles: 0
Miles Walked: 2
Etna is a hiker-friendly Town. They allow camping at the city park ($5). An additional $5 gets you a shower with a towel (not always a given on the trail). The park also has lockers you can rent to store your pack/gear in – nice when the laundromat is a mile walk away. The lockers have electrical outlets so you can charge overnight without fear your phone/Garmin will be stolen. – I trust my fellow thru hikers, but in towns you’re back dealing with the public. I don’t trust the public.
A hiker friendly town, except for the Johnston family reunion
At least 20 other hikers camped at the park last night. Most I recognized from the trail, but there were a few I didn’t. Some of them had tents or clothing different from your typical thru hiker. — As with my job, we can usually identify our own kind on sight.
I saw one perusing the hiker bin. He was wearing one of the fake black mustaches I’d left there last night. I complimented him on it. When I asked him if he was hiking out today, he said he wasn’t a hiker. His name was Chris and he was a hobo.
We chatted a bit. He was very amiable. I had extra food I offered him and in return he offered me coffee and oatmeal. I later learned that hobos are traveling workers, as opposed to hikers, who are essentially tramps – travelers who don’t work, or bums, who don’t travel or work.
Before heading over to the local coffee shop,I talked with several hikers about the fire closure and detour in southern Oregon. Most leaned towards doing the closure/detour vice “yellow blazing” (skipping ahead via hitch or bus) to Ashland, OR. We still had over 100 miles to go until the detour. If the fire or smoke got worse, we still had Seiad Valley, CA as a bailout point.
I hung out in coffee shop til it closed at 2 pm, downloading maps and info about the fire detour. At one point I struck up a nice conversation with another patron, Ally, a college student from WA who was working at JH Ranch for the summer. I eventually went outside to call HH. When I returned to my table, Ally had left me inspiring and beautiful note of encouragement for my hike. It was so touching, I later went on the JH Ranch website and sent a message telling them what a wonderful young woman they had in their employ.
Throughout the day I was hemming and hawing over the upcoming fire closure. I wanted to hike the detour, but the PCTA website was very discouraging, warning that hikers shouldn’t do it alone, needed to be expert navigators as the detour was a series of unmarked forest service roads and that printed maps were a must. I was pretty sure I could navigate my way through, but had no way to print the maps. I decided to wait for Smokebeard. I was pretty sure he would want to hike the detour vice skip ahead. At least we could expertly navigate it together sans printed maps. — In the end, there was a .gpx file I was able to download to my Garmin inReach that showed the detour route and a document from a trail angel who’d gone out and hiked the detour noting where there was water.
Smokebeard arrived shortly after the coffee shop closed. It’d been in the high 90’s again, so he was feeling the effects of the heat. We ate at the local brewery and caught up on some locals news. The Etna police had gone by the city park and kicked the hikers out for the next 24 hrs. The park had been “reserved” for a family reunion and the family had complained.
Even though it didn’t sound right -it was a rather large park and the camping area was a ways away from the gazebo and grilling area – we decided to go to the Hiker Hut vice run afoul of the police. The Hut is a bunkhouse in town that obviously hosts hikers. We’d sleep there and then hike out late tomorrow, after the heat of the day subsides. Plus it would give me a chance to catch up on the blog a little. Not much, but even a little was good.
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