Day 90; Wed July 25 2007

(Stud) I'd write that I woke up on the wrong side of the sleeping bag this morning, but the would imply I actually slept last night. The only people that should spend the night at Castle Crag State Park are the stone deaf or folks that own a sound proof camper. The interstate and a heavily used rail line are so close, it sounds like they're going right though your camp site. And it sounds that way all night long. Also, at the camp site next to ours, a family came in at 11PM, set up a supersized tent that had 200 ft of metal tent poles with shock cord that needed to be clicked together, then blew up their air mattresses with what sounded like a vacuum cleaner. The dad immediately went to sleep and started snoring--so I guess this place is ok for the "dead tired" as well. Oh, and the ground was like concrete (which I guess is expected in this setting). To add to that, this morning we learned that while the food lockers did protect our food from the bears, we weren't so lucky!
with the mice. Both my pack and Dwight's food bag had holes chewed in them and the mice got to my tortillas and pita bread and D's ramen. I guess we were lucky; the damage could have been much worse. So, before setting off, we hiked back down to the grocery store and replaced the food we had to throw out.

Once back from the store, we headed back to the trail using directions from our guide book. We got to he first trail intersection OK, but from there couldn't make heads or tails out of the instructions, even after we both read them about 4X apiece. Finally Dwight figured it out by studying the microscopic sized map for a while. In retrospect, the instructions, which covered several paragraphs of information, were as simple as: "Take trail A to trail B. This will dump you back on the PCT". What ever happened to the KISS approach? My two big beefs about the guide books: 1) maps too small, 2) words too many.

My right shin still feels like crap so we weren't moving too fast today. After last night and this morning's mouse fiasco, my attitude wasnKt the best, so it was nice to run into Troll and Oblivious who were taking a break in the middle of the trail. "I don't think I'm going to get in too many miles today...I just don't feel like hiking", Troll told us. They had gone into Shasta City last night; Troll's dad had met them there. So the 4 of us lumbered on together and eeked about about 20 miles.