The night at the Mount Laguna lodge – a very expensive place for a real shithole – made us starting late again. Quite late: before ten o’clock we were not yet back on the trail. I wanted to eat a real breakfast and went back to the tavern where we had lunch on Wednesday. After four French toasts with berries and maple syrup and two scrambled eggs, I feared I had eaten too much: I was reminded of the bad day during last year’s Translagorai when I binged on fried krapfen with jam, and until the evening my stomach was in turmoil; I could barely enjoy a few hours of hiking that day. Fortunately, this was not the case: after half an hour of hiking, my body immediately began to burn those precious calories and my engine was well warmed up for the day.
Despite the very late start we still managed to do 18 kilometers, which is not even 12 miles. It may not be much, but I’m arriving pretty tired at the end of the day. I am slowly building the stamina and muscles I will need in the weeks ahead, and no one is running after me. Rushing the first hundred miles or so is among the worst thing an aspiring thru-hiker can do.
The environment is more or less the same: coniferous forests similar to those of Mediterranean climates, low shrubs, many of which are the beginnings of future forests (my guess) restored after a fire, the corpses of which we encountered occasionally.
Tomorrow we have the first of two fairly intense days: we are 24 kilometers from the point where we will have to get the first hitchhike to get to the town of Julian, a classic stop for almost all PCT hikers. The problem is always being able to manage water, the critical element that determines all plans day by day.
