I could hear it raining during the night off and on, so I procrastinated getting up. There were plenty of people camped around me that got an earlier start, so I let them clear off all the bushes of their accumulated precipitation from the night before. The trail was mostly flat in this section with lots of forest. The weather was damp, but not wet. The clouds were low and the fog made for an eerie feeling even in the middle of summer. I felt pretty strong when I woke up and it seemed like each day it was getting easier to move. This day, though, I had to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of having wet feet. Even though the branches were fairly dry, my feet were still in recovery mode from the day before.
I spent a little time on the trail talking to people. Richard, who was a former heart surgeon from Seattle, and I talked for quite a while. Then at a junction I talked to a young German woman who was hiking with her mother. There were also many people going by who were heading south and I was even able to see a woman whose blog Jacqueline and I had been following before we left. The flatness of the forest did not help the bugs for sure and soon there were a lot of small ponds showing up. This was a sure sign of mosquitoes, but we got the bonus today because not only were there mosquitoes, but biting flies also. I put on bug spray, but after a while, it did not seem to help as much as it should.
So, needless to say, I took short breaks because every time I stopped it gave the mosquitoes a chance to feast. I also spent a lot more time listening to music or books while hiking because the buzzing of the mosquitoes often bothered me more than the biting and blood sucking. I think this was the worst section of trail I had the whole trip for bugs and it was confirmed with the conversations I had with other hikers on the trail. I seemed to fly to the Walupt Lake trail junction. I am sure this was a wonderful place to spend some time once the mosquitoes left the area, but I could not imagine how miserable it would be to camp here. I hoped it would get better and that all of Goat Rocks would not be spoiled with mosquitoes. After the junction for Walupt Lake, it did better. The trail started to gain elevation. Here I was on an open exposed slope and it seemed like with every hundred feet of elevation gained, the mosquitoes began dropping like flies. I was getting excited because the terrain was getting so much more interesting as I climbed also. The views were bigger and the trail was becoming more like the visions that one has of the Pacific Crest Trail. There were mountains in the distance, lakes below me, and a precipitous drop off falling off to my left.
Soon I was approaching Sheep Lake and even though it was only 4 pm, I was thinking this was my stopping point for the night. Given that I had put in 20 miles to get here, I felt like that was okay to stop. I quickly perused the available campsites and took the one on the highest hill. When Richard came through later, he called it the penthouse. It was an awesome sight out in the warm sun overlooking the lake. I got my tent up and decided to give washing clothes a try. I had made one major mistake so far and that was in only bringing 3 pairs of socks. I thought that a good washing would do me well. I put my dirty clothes in a dry bag with a little soap, shook it up pretty good, and then hung them on a line.
The problem with that is that it never ended up being warm enough to dry the clothing. So it hung on the line, often in the sun, but never actually got dry. Oh well, I still had one more dry clean pair of socks left that would have to last me for the last couple of days before I got to White Pass. I think that Sheep Lake was my favorite campsite on the whole trail. I took a short dip in the lake and really just had a very relaxing evening. A guy named Lou came over and chatted for 15 minutes. He was hiking the PCT by car. He would drive to the more exciting places on the trail and hike around those areas rather than doing the whole thing. I thought that was pretty creative. I enjoyed a good night of sleep and prepared for tomorrow. Many people I talked to going south had said that Goat Rocks was the best area that they had hiked in thus far.
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