Petey's post about the PCT

This is Pete. Let me just preface this by saying I am not much of a blogger, so bare with me. Maggie has been asking me to write a little something about my adventures on the Pacific Crest Trail with my buddies Jeff Meakins and Justin Scott...so here it is!

Back in January of this year, my pals Jeff, Justin and I began planning for a 5 day 4 night hike on the Pacific Crest Trail thru the Sisters National Wilderness near Bend, Oregon. After a few months of going back and forth, we decided to start from Lava Camp Lake and head southbound to Elk Lake. All in all totaling around 45 miles from start to finish.

After an awesome evening of fly fishing and campfire at Lava Camp Lake, we began hiking the next morning, August 19th and couldn't have asked for better weather. The first few miles were thru a heavy lava field and off in the distance, we could see the peak of the north sister. At one point that first day, at around 7500 feet in elevation, looking from north to south we could see mt. adams, mt. hood, mt. jefferson, mt washington and the north and middle sister, it was quite breathtaking. We finished for the day at an unbelievably beautiful place called Obsidian Falls. Our campground overlooked the water fall and we could see far off to the west enjoying a beautiful sunset. The only problem...mosquitos were extremely heavy. By the end of the trip, I had over 200 bites! For dinner we had a combination of mac n cheese mixed with chili (meximac) and capped off the night with some whiskey and cribbage!

The next morning, another glorious day. We began hiking southbound on the PCT and decided to take a loop off of the trail about 4 miles into the hike. This was probably the most scenic section. We stopped for some fly fishing and lunch at Eileen Lake. We got a few bites but no hooks! I was able to get in an afternoon nap in Justin's eaglesnest hammock. After that we set off again and hiked another couple of miles to Husband lake where we set up camp for night three. It was only about 2 in the afternoon when we had bathed in the lake and the mosquitos were back again. We spent most of the evening in the tent playing cribbage to avoid the relentless attack of these abnormally large flies. We settled for brown rice and tuna and didn't even have a campfire because the mosquitos were so bad.

The next morning, Justin woke up around 4 am and headed back to Eileen Lake for some early morning fly fishing...still no luck. He got back around 7 am and Jeff and I got up and to our terror, the mosquitos were everywhere again and extremely heavy (they usually aren't out before sunrise). At one point as I was packing up and out of the comfort of my tent, I inhaled a couple of the little buggers. We quickly packed up and began hiking, skipping our usual breakfast of cliff bars and oatmeal. After a few hours, we stopped at a beautiful creek and pumped some fresh water as it was about 85 degrees that day. We made it about 10 miles before we stopped at another lake (can't remember the name) and took a bath and had some lunch. Justin (the guru) had made a sweet mosquito net that we ended up rigging into a dome with our trekking poles (why didn't we think of this earlier) and were able to elude the mosquitos for about an hour nap. We kept on and began hiking up for our final night and had some amazing fews of the south sister. As we were heading up, we passed by several thru hikers (hikers that started from Mexico and were headed for the Canadian border). One guy gave us a hint of a sweet camp spot at about 7000 feet. Shortly after that, we found it and realized that we had discovered the best campsite ever with amazing views of the south sister, mt. bachelor, and broken top mountain. We enjoyed a nice campfire, some whiskey and our traditional last night meal of tortallini with cheese, herbs and sausage (it's amazing when you've been hiking all day).

We awoke to an amazing sunrise and began the descent into Elk Lake, our final destination. When we got to the lodge, we immediately ordered a pitcher of IPA and some bacon cheeseburgers. It was an epic trip of beautiful scenery, nasty mosquitos and good trail food. We've already begun planning for next year...Jefferson Park here we come!