Day 143 - 9 Days Remaining

***Before I get into this entry too far, I want to encourage you to check out my previous blog entry and think about contributing to the Lance Armstrong Foundation if you can. It is tax-deductible and will help me toward my fundraising goal. Also, I find it pretty cool that the LAF is promoting October 2 as LIVESTRONG DAY. (October 2 is the 13-year anniversary of Lance Armstrong's cancer diagnosis.) Ah, if only it were a day later.***

Now, onto the blog entry...

Well, today went moderately according to plan. If it weren't for resupply stops, I'd have had this trail finished a month ago! It's not that this stop was too much out of the ordinary (minus the distance of nearly 25 miles from Stevens Pass to Skykomish/Bering), it's just the nature of resupply stops. They just take time. You've got to shower, do laundry, eat, and make sure you've got enough food for the next section. If it's a main resupply point, then usually that means you've got a bounce box to send somewhere, which means a trip to the Post Office. Of course, you are doing this in a town you don't know and without a car, which definitely complicates matters. More often than not, the variables conspire against you and everything takes longer than you anticipate.

This would explain why I'm essentially camping at the trailhead at Stevens Pass tonight. By the time all the said resupplying was complete and I was back up at the trailhead, it was nearly dark. So, I figured I would just make camp wherever I could (it ended up being about 1/4 mile up the trail) and hope that I'm able to get up in the morning and get a good jump on the day. If I am to have any prayer of getting to Stehekin by Monday evening, I need to put in at least a 25-mile-day tomorrow. It would be much better to put in a bigger day than that to start building a buffer for navigating all the blowdowns (trees across the trail) that I know are farther up the trail. This is where the shorter days are really a problem. If I had 15 hours of daylight like I did in the Sierras, then I'd be golden, but I've only got 12. And even if I'm hiking for 10 of those, best case scenario is 30 miles.

Of course, the stress level has definitely been ratcheted up a notch. The end of the trail and the race against the weather will do that to you. Everyone is feeling it though. Despite the fact that the weather should be holding up for the time being, you can still never be sure.

Speaking of weather, I learned a couple of valuable things today from the locals. The first isn't actually directly weather-related: The terrain going from Stevens Pass to Stehekin is harsher than the terrain from Stehekin to Canada. The second is that just before I'll get to Stehekin, the trail will take me over to the east side of the Cascades, where the weather is traditionally more favorable. This is big and explains how Skykomish has a forecast for rain beginning next week and yet Stehekin is clear for the next 10 days! Finally, additional good news is that the trail will stay on the east side of the Cascades all the way to Manning Park once it crosses over by Stehekin. So the short of the long is that if everything (hiking schedules and weather forecasts) hold to form, then I should have a small window of favorable weather from here to Canada which would be AWESOME. I'm certainly not assuming anything, but definitely trying to keep moving as quickly as I can while I can.

A funny story before I wrap this up on an important note... Today, as I mentioned, I needed to resupply in Skykomish, about 25 miles from the trail. I waited about 15 minutes before a guy pulled over and offered me a lift. Not five minutes down the road, this electronic device mounted on his dash that I had never seen before started beeping. He proceeds to pick up this phone-like-looking device, took a deep breath, and blew into the small mouthpiece on the other side. He informed me that he had it installed "so that drunk people can't steal his car." I laughed then and I still laugh now when I think about it, because obviously I made it out okay. But that's a perfect example of some of the things you get to experience on a trip like this--never would I willfully put myself in a situation like that off the trail. But on the trail, beggars can't be choosers and you've gotta take what you can get to make it from Point A to Point B. In the end, it makes for a good story.

This is quickly turning into one of my longest entries of the trip thus far, and maybe it's because I'm pretty sure you won't have any updates to read for a while due to the fact that I'll be in some of the most remote terrain on the entire trail. Whatever the reason, I just want to say thanks to everyone out there who has been so supportive of me along the way, regardless of the form of that support. When I started out in May, I had no idea what to expect because I had never tackled a hike of this magnitude or anything even close to it. There were plenty of times when I probably could have quit and felt totally justified in doing so, and while I haven't made it yet, I can say that on several occasions it was the family member, friend, and even stranger who came alongside me and did or said something that helped keep me going. It didn't need to be something major. Just something to remind me that people were out there pulling for me. So, on that note, I say thank you.