Day 100 – Siskiyou Mountain Club

7/23

Miles: 1610.4 to 1634.5

Trail Miles: 24.1

The PCT north of Etna Summit is one of the best built and maintained sections of the trail. I was thinking about this when I ran into a crew doing trail maintenance. I have to commend the Siskiyou Mountain Club ( #SiskiyouMountainClub ) and their trail crews. The rock walls and stonework were evidence of hard manual labor, not to mention what this crew was doing to prevent erosion and cut back the overgrowth. I made sure to say thank you to all of them. And while I have gratitude to all the volunteers and organizations that do maintenance out here, Siskiyou Mountain Club – you folks are tops in my book!

Erosion control is paramount in NorCal. So much of the area around the trail has burned in recent years, and there is very little regrowth at this point. It’s easy for the soil and trail to washout in rain or snow.

After a few miles the trail left the burn area and was back in a beautiful forest where the wildflowers were just stunning.

Even with all the recent burns and forest fires the Trinity Alps and Klamath National Forest are still gorgeous

The trail eventually round through the Marble Mountains – literally mountains made of marble. A very beautiful area. The wildfire flowers were huge. It was hard to get a picture in perspective – many were taller than me.

In the late afternoon I could start to see smoke from the Hendricks fire, just north of the CA/OR line. We’ll be in Seiad Valley tomorrow and get an update on the status. Hopefully there’s still a viable detour around the fire. I can’t express just how disappointing it will be to not cross the CA/OR border on foot. California is a really loooong state, 1691 miles to be exact.

Smokebeard and I caught up to Waterfall at the campsite. She was continuing on and was just getting water at the nearby spring. Two South Korean hikers stopped and made dinner as Smokebeard and I were eating. They’d already done 30 Miles today and were pushing on into Seiad Valley tonight. It was after 8 pm when they left and they still had 21 miles to go to SV. –When I was younger I would have done sufferfests like that, but it doesn’t interest me at all now. Age has a way of mellowing you.

Our campsite tonight turned out to be a big deer hang out. Several 3-point bucks milled around all night. I don’t know if it’s from all the hikers peeing nearby (deer eat pee’d on soil) or the natural spring about 200 yds away, but they weren’t too skittish and woke me up throughout the night.