Are you ready for a knock-knock joke?
- Knock knock- who’s there?
- catastrophic failure
- catastrophic failure who?
- catastrophic gear failure
- Exactly. It’s not funny.
It appears that this is the section of the trail where my gear starts failing:
- My smartwool shirt became so holy that the Vatican expressed interest. Map girl replaced it for me with a new, sweet-smelling icebreaker shirt.
- my navigation map app had a software update which made it impossible to tell one’s location without cell service (defeating the purpose of the app), seriously messing up my navigation.
- and my black diamond flz distance trekking poles catastrophically failed. Fortunately this happened on a modest downhill slope and not on a river crossing where it could have been hazardous. Given that my tent requires trekking poles to function (and probably my knees as well), there was a 5-mile section where I was frantically stick hunting. After taking a break I performed amazing field repair using duct tape, and got in touch with Nicole D and Beth to orchestrate a mission to get me access to the other pair of trekking poles I have. Good job!!! Meanwhile, a scathing product review will be posted on the intertubes in the eventual future.
Other news:
I usually find a couple people that I hike a few hours with on and off each day. I’m definitely in front of the PCTpack, so there’s probably only around 15-20 hikers in a section a day as opposed to 50+. Hoping to find some new folks to form a #tramily with, but we’ll see what happens. I hear Oregon is where all dreams come true!
The past couple of days I’ve successfully been running a calorie surplus!!! It’s amazing how easy it becomes when you have town food! Thanks echo lake chalet!
With all sorts of trail love (it’s a little smelly and dirty),
Jeff