Day 17

Muskrat Creek Shelter to Standing Indian Shelter 4.9 miles – AT mile 86.1

Card of the day – 7 of wands

The day started cold, so cold, like a double shot of porridge kinda cold.  Which is exactly what I did, in the shelter, having packed a very wet tent up.

It rained most the morning, but we thought we had a window from 12:00-3:00 to make the next shelter, where the rain would be a little lighter (we were spectacularly wrong! But hay ho!)

There is something beautiful about the woods in the rain, the light changes and the moss seems to pop with colour and come alive.

Naturally, hiking in the rain I managed to fall on my arse.  What else is there to do but follow Mighty Blue’s example, so I shouted out “3” got up and carried on.  Fortunately, nothing was damaged.

The scandal at the shelter

At the shelter there was a lady.  She seemed to be a tad scatty and was packing up her stuff.  The only thing we knew about her was that she was once a Sunday School teacher.

Kegstand was platting people’s hair and so had her dry cloths bag out, as she needed bands.

The Sunday School teacher finally managed to get out of camp and had arranged a shuttle with Sherper Al to get picked up four miles down the road at a gap.

I’m sure you can see what’s coming next? Off she went with Kegstand’s dry cloths bag.

We did not realise for a while, after all we were waiting for our gap in the rain, but after a bit of nagging from me Kegstand was packing her pack and noticed the missing bag.

Now dry clothes are an important commodity in a down pour, they can quite literally save your life!

After frantically searching the shelter, we narrowed it down to the Sunday School teacher, she was the only person that had been in the shelter and had left.

It was just after 12:00 and we were getting ready to try and catch her when I suggested we call Sherper Al, and get him to ask her to check when he picked her up, and we set off on the chase, four miles two hours!  We got this.

Turns out she knew before the shuttle driver got there that she had the bag!  Some other hikers that had passed through during the search had met her and asked her about it.  Anyway, Kegstand got a call to say that the bag had been found from Sherper Al, so we were excited that she would be reunited with it in just a matter of minutes.

Underhill made it to the gap at 2:00, just in time to see them drive off!  The Sunday School teacher got in the shuttle with the bag!

Sherper Al was fantastic and arranged to send said bag back to the gap after his rounds.  In the end it was returned about an hour later.

The fellowship is disappointed in you Sunday School teacher, knowing you had the bag and going on with it is not cool.

At Standing Indian Shelter

Some College kids from Ohio were down on a trip.  They had sure caught the worst of the weather.  There were about eight of them all huddled down in their bags on the shelter floor.  They were all great, actually, and we chatted and laughed as we passed the time, them on the floor, hiker trash on the platform, all just hiding from the rain.

Said rain broke about 8:00 and gave beautiful sunset views over the valley.  There was a sea of cloud below, which just looked magical in the purple and pink sky of the sunset.

There were posted warnings all over the place about bear activity, so we did a real good PCT bear hang!  Well done us, feeing very smug with ourselves!