Throughout the night, my foot touches things. It touches my sleeping pad, it touches my sack of clothes, it touches my water bottle, it touches my other foot. Each time my foot touches something, it is a hot knife of pain.

For weeks it was very wet, and now, just like that, Washington is very dry. My shriveled prune feet have turned to dry hard little leathers, leathers with deep cracks that spurt blood. The cracks wake me up again and again, and when I wake, I hear the deer and the mice playing out their deer and mice dramas outside. This land is their land, and I am but a guest. The deer and mice quiet for no one.

I slept like shit. Carrot slept like shit. Bogwitch slept like shit. Our Swiss friend says he slept amazing and we all quietly resent him. Stupid kind Swiss man being so nice and well slept. What a monster.

We’re ready to go by 6:45AM and it’s already warming up. We plan to go 21 miles today and I am slow as frozen molasses, limping up the trail, suspended in time. My body is usually stiff in the morning, but today my ankles and tendons all around them feel hot and inflamed. I think they’ll warm up and smooth out, and on the left side they do but the right sustains a persistent dull of pain. I hike slower, it hurts. I try to hike faster, I can’t, it hurts more. I get angry at the pain and the pain doesn’t give a fuck.

By mid morning my world is all exposed climb through deep burn and lupine field. This time last year this area looked like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and this year it is an explosion of purple wildflowers. For some reason, I cry thinking about my grandparents, two people whom have been dead for years. I think about how I don’t really have a home, my dad is dead and my mom is mean and no one lives where I grew up anymore besides. My grandparents were kind of my home because they actually liked me, they thought I was funny and smart instead of just in the way. The burnt forest and the lupine field feels like their love.

I leap frog with Carrot and try not to get my grump on her. She doesn’t feel great either. It’s hot, our stomachs hurt, the water is sparse, our packs our too heavy. I find reception and I google my specific outer ankle pain and it says I have Peroneal Tendonitis. I find a way to KT tape it. I feel bad for my legs and my feet and I am angry at them in equal measure. I haven’t had tendonitis before and I don’t understand why it’d appear now.

At lunch I tell Carrot and Bogwitch about my new tendonitis and they wonder if it’s because I ran down all of the hills yesterday. Probably the answer is yes, and I’m feeling like a petulant child. Other people can push, why can’t I push?! I am sullen, I tape the ankle, I eat refried bean soup and we pack up. Seven miles to Chinook Pass and we hear there’s trail magic. Four more miles to camp after that.

One mile after we leave our lunch ridge I start thinking about hitching to Packwood from Chinook Pass instead of hiking 30 more miles into town. The tape has done nothing for my tendon at all, the pain is intensifying with each step. I text Carrot and Bogwitch. Carrot says she’ll come with, Bogwitch says they’ll consider their options. I hike furious and in pain. Mt. Ranier is gorgeous in the distance. I try to focus.

Eventually, the pass comes. The trail angel is still there and he has Cokes and chips and salsa and as I shovel food into my mouth, my rage subsides. I’m going to hitch to town now. It’s going to be okay.

—

📍 This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Yakama land.

The deer and the mice join hands, forming a circle around our tent. As night commences, they dance, a great raucous circle surrounding us. Do they aim to keep us safe, or keep us awake?

In the morning, I am tired. I woke many times in the night to quietly observe the meeting of the deer and the mice and I am groggy in the glow of the sunrise. I drink my coffee. I eat my oats. I want to go back to bed.

But I don’t! Instead I gather two liters of water, and prepare for an 1800 foot climb. I am too cold to de-layer, and then within five minutes I am too hot to think of anything else. Guthook says there might be a toilet two miles in and I plan to use it and change there too.

The climb is slow and my calf is bothering me. I haven’t rolled my ankle this section, but it’s still tight and I can feel it affecting my whole left side. I’m slow to the toilet and when I arrive there’s actually no toilet at all, just a dusty road with no place to shit. It turns out holding it made the urge disappear anyway, so I change my clothes and put on my headphones. I can go later.

Carrot and I discuss foods we have eaten and foods we will eat again. We discuss salads and pasta with homemade marinara and crispy tempeh and homemade sauerkraut. We talk about how we’re going to go to Alaska in a few weeks, maybe to hike in the arctic, but in between we can eat some of these delicacies. I’m hungry on a cellular level.

The climb and my calf are making me mad, so I let Carrot surge ahead and I fade to a slow crawl. I find her taking a break nearly at the top and I kiss her and keep going. I’m tired of being so slow, I want to get a move on.

Eventually the downhill comes and I decide to try to be fast. It’s been weeks since I pushed myself and I can really get down to a snail’s pace if I allow myself to. On this downhill, I use my poles as much as possible and I try to run. I make it downhill in record time and I am winded and happy to feel like I GOT somewhere. Finally.

Our first water source of the day is 12 miles in and so that is where we take lunch. I arrive first and happily eat vegan cheez-its in the sun while lazily swatting away the aggressive flies. I have fond memories of this water source last year, even have a picture of Carrot gathering water as the sun glows all around her. The PCT is a very special place and I love being here. It reminds me of falling in love.

Carrot shows up and Bogwitch does too. We all have terrible gas on account of the instant refried beans we’re all eating and our laughter is peppered with brrrraps straight from our buttholes. We eat a lot of caffeinated shot blocks and drink electrolytes. We’re going to go ten more miles, which makes a longer hiking day than our usual. The sun is shining. the terrain is so much gentler than it has been. We’re excited.

We all hike together for the next five miles. We talk about testosterone and call out culture and Beyoncé. I supply the insight that Beyoncé is nature’s caffeine. We’re going fast and our time flies. I almost never actually hike with people, but today it feels easy and wonderful to laugh with friends. We make it to the Ulrich cabin in just a couple of hours.

The Ulrich cabin is a nice cabin in the woods. It’s maintained by the local snow mobile club, it has two shitters, and reportedly a lot of mice. We break at the cabin and I finally poop, Carrot and Bogwitch taste test an MRE given to them by a local. It’s BBQ beef and black beans, and they say it’s actually pretty good. I’m kind of freaked out by weird shelf stable food, but I appreciate their ability to just go for it.

We have five miles to camp from here and I book it, again wanting to push my body just a little bit. I rediscover Kesha and I hike listening to songs about partying and hot dudes. I like Kesha. That gal really knows what she wants.

We camp in a burn next to a babbeling brook. We meet a nice Swiss man who’s very close to finishing and we make jokes about hiking things: food and speed and gear and hikers who see this whole thing as a competition. The bugs eat us alive and our farting intensifies. With that, it’s time to go to sleep.

—

📍 This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Yakama land.

Here are just a few things about today :

1) Carrot and I wake up to mouse turds on the lids of our pots. There’s one turd on her pot and three turds on mine. I….want to die at the sight of the mouse turds. Why. Just….why.

2) I come up with a very good idea for a meme account. The account will be queer thru hiking memes. Here is an example of one meme: imagine a silhouetted figure, on top of a mountain during a very bodacious sunset. The figure (let’s be honest, me) looks pensive and beneath it says “TFW you’re thinking of having the cock sent to White Pass” (White Pass is our next town and I’m honestly sorry to make the joke less funny by explaining the punchline but I know that won’t make sense to most so I HAD TO.) There’s this idea in thru hiking that if you’re wearing something it doesn’t count as a part of your base weight, so Bogwitch, Carrot and I also kick around some meme ideas having to do with the cock and wearing it while hiking etc etc and we’re laughing so hard I could cry. The last meme we think of is a shot of a hand, very dirty except the two gay sexy fingers, which are very clean. The meme says: my hand looks like this so that her’s can look like this (here there will be a shot of a hiker hand clutching a sleeping pad in ecstasy). ANYWAY these are all fucking hilarious, but if I had to make a Venn diagram of thru hikers and queers, I think the overlap would be woefully small.

3) It did not rain yesterday, and it did not rain today. The defining characteristic of this hike has been rain (there’s never been two days without it) and I am so ecstatic I can hardly speak.

—

📍 This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Puget Sound Salish and Columbia-Wenatchi land.

I drink an iced coffee. I drink a green smoothie. I drink a kombucha. I eat a banana with peanut butter. I eat two sides of hash browns. I cover them with hot sauce and ketchup. I salt everything now, lots of salt, there’s never enough salt. I eat many bites of Carrot’s pancake. It’s not vegan or gluten free, I’m sure and for that I will suffer. I download more music. I download Beyoncé’s Homecoming from Netflix to watch in the tent. I check and recheck social media, my email. There’s no reason not to hike now, I did all of the things. It’s almost 2 PM and it’s time to go.

Bogwitch, Carrot and I head up under ski gondolas, back to the PCT. I am hiking heavy (all the food) and tired (Carrot and I stayed up very late touching and kissing and whatnot) and I am S L O W slow. It’s not raining though. The trail isn’t too steep. I’m not too cold and I’m not too hot. I zone out in my slow world, think about what makes a good book vs. a bad book, thinking about my hands on Carrot’s skin, thinking about my childhood. Everything is muddy or rocky, but god it could be so much worse. It’s hard to be mad, and so I don’t bother.

8.8 miles in there’s a sparkling blue jewel of a lake. Bogwitch, Carrot and I pitch our tents here, cook our meals around a log and an extinguished fire pit. I make macaroni and cheese and I’m surprised to see the white flavor instead of the orange. I mix it with peas and eat chips while my noodles boil, contentedly chewing as I wait.

It’s cold here, too cold for much socializing and we’re all tired besides. We blow our neoairs and we pull out our quilts. We lay our heads down at seven PM, and with that— we’re out.

—

📍 This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Puget Sound Salish and Columbia-Wenatchi land.

Snoqualmie is my favorite trail town.

You can walk right into Snoqualmie straight from the PCT. There are two convenience stores, with MANY a flavor of chip, bar, and kombucha. The diner gives HUGE plates of fried potato sides. You can have your resupply box sent straight to the motel. The motel has laundry right in it, the convenience stores sell detergent, it’s easy to get quarters at the front desk. The coffee shop has cold brew and green smoothies. The food cart has a jackfruit curry.

Every single thing you need to do happens within a one block radius.

Nothing could be more beautiful.

—

📍 This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Puget Sound Salishand Columbia-Wenatchi land.

My shirt feels thick. It’s thick with sweat and grime and condensation, and still I put it on. This is the story of a thru hike.

I did not sleep well. Deer and mice danced around our tent all night and I had nightmares that woke me in a cold sweat. I’ve been damp for so many days, I’ll never stop being damp now. It’s four AM and I’m dreading putting on my wet shoes.

But I do. I put them on and I hike nine rocky miles in the pouring rain up a hill. Sometimes the rain lessens and I am happy, sometimes the rain intensifies and I am furious. It is July, on the Washington section of the PCT. It’s really not supposed to be doing this, but here we are.

The rocks are medium sized, not the kind you can crunch over without noticing, not large ones, which you can hop to stone to stone. These are ankle twisters, and I try to be very careful. I’ve had intrusive thoughts lately, I’m honestly worried the next time I twist my ankle, it’ll snap in half. I keep having visions of it, they won’t go away.

We set up our shelter halfway through. Both of us are almost out of food, but we cobble together a nice buffet of brick a brack and crumbs. Once we’re done eating we’re too cold to rest more and so we go. Just ten more miles to town we say. Gotta get to town.

The climb ends, and the descent can we summed up in one word: muddy. I slide down, mud caking my poles, my shoes, my ankles, my calves. I’m still as careful as possible with my ankles, trying to stay upright but more than anything, I am participating in a controlled fall down this mountain. Ferns frame the muddy path, they brush water uponst me. I turn on an audiobook. I do the only thing that makes any sense so close to town: I try to just go.

—

📍
This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Puget Sound Salish and Columbia-Wenatchi land.

At 4:30 AM it starts to rain. The sky was perfectly clear and sunny all day, but no matter, now the rain falls. Carrot gently shakes me awake and we put our packs in garbage bags, make sure nothing touches the edges of the shelter, inviting water in. I am annoyed, and then I am back to sleep.

We wake at 6:30, pretty late for us. We go through the morning motions and I learn that Carrot hasn’t slept well, for the third night in a row. She has a good attitude about her insomnia, though. “I’ll sleep tonight” she says. She said the same thing last night, too.

First thing, we climb. We climb for many miles and gain a few thousand feet and it is gentle, all things considered. I listen to a book about teenagers in New York in 1993, and I like it. In one of the chapters, the main character takes ecstasy and I wonder if I should take ecstasy too, sometime. You know, just for fun.

At lunch, we set up the shelter. It’s damp and soggy, needs a good dry out, and beyond that— the bugs are brave and carnivorous, definitely 100% here to suck our blood. In the shelter we take off our shirts and look at our food. Neither of us has enough, but we can ration well enough through tomorrow when we get to town. I eat dried chickpeas in ramen, spooning noodles into my mouth while I lay down. I play with Carrot’s baby duck colored hair, trying to pull the dead bugs out of her part. We are both absolutely covered in mosquito carcass. Parts of hair, folds of skin, in between our cracks: bugs, bugs, bugs.

After lunch, a sweet descent. We walk a pine needle covered forest path and we talk about things we have done before and things we hope to do in the future. We talk about trails, the ins and outs of this and that. Carrot has a beautiful brain and I like that she lets me into it.

We do a lot of remembering of when I hiked this section last year. In this exact section I got lost (on the PCT!!!! It honestly takes talent to get lost on the PCT.) my mistake forced me to hike an accidental 24 mile day, something I was absolutely NOT ready for. I burned a hole in my sleeping bag. My knees hurt so bad I hiked mostly 1 mile per hour, crying. And look at me now! I’m kinda damp and I roll my ankle a lot, but mostly I am fine.

We wanted to go 20.8 miles today, but we’re both starting to fade. We toy with the idea of going 18 or 19 instead and as soon as the plan crosses our minds, we’re in it. Our descent unceremoniously ends and we climb up 700 feet, switchback after switchback pulling us up and up and up. We’re zombies, suddenly exhausted with a mile left to climb. There are blow downs to crawl under and there is drizzle. I turn my brain off and just try to go, and eventually— somehow— we make it.

—

📍 This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Puget Sound Salishand Columbia-Wenatchi land.

Coffee, oatmeal, deflate neoair, tape ankle, brush teeth, take the down shelter, stuff stuff in sacks, pack everything into packs. Put packs on, pull the straps tight, go. Every morning is almost exactly the same.

Last night if didn’t rain, and today, I don’t think it will either. The sky is thick with mist, but i have faith— it will clear.

I worry about my ankle. It’s sore and large, looks like it maybe has an extra ball floating around in there. Did I grow a new bone? From twisting and turning and prodding?

We climb and we descend, we climb and we descend. At lunch, the bugs are a thick cloud, flying as hard and fast as they can at our mouths, our noses, our eyes. They crave all of our exposed wet spots and it is truly disgusting how few fucks they give. The bugs are both primal and carnal, our orifices are their singular points of focus.

At lunch, we set up the shelter to avoid them. The shelter is a green house and we take off our shirts in the balmy warm. I eat vegan cheez-it’s and we talk about our past relationships and our gender presentations. Do straight people on trail talk about this stuff? Probably relationships yes, gender expressions no. I am so grateful to be queer. We talk about all the most interesting stuff.

After lunch I hike our 9 mile descent with laser like Beyoncé focus. It’s my turn to carry the shelter, it is my goal to get to camp before Carrot and have it ready to dive in before the mosquitos are too thick. I have shooting calf pain, a new curiosity of the body. I have not quite enough food for this section. But the sun is out and soon the shelter is set up and we’re eating dinner in the gloaming. There have been hardly any days without rain in the past three weeks and I don’t care WHAT is going on, nothing can steal this thunder.

—

📍 This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Puget Sound Salishand Columbia-Wenatchi land.

I wake up and I am wet, but also warm. I eat two bars and some chips for breakfast, two other hikers wander by and give me fuel and so my coffee is piping hot. I’m almost to town, if I hustle I can be there by noon. I am 10000% over being isolated and soaked in the woods, and I’m going to make it happen.

My pack feels like it weighs twice as much on account of its complete saturation. I am stressed by my wet quilt, my wet electronics bag, my wet steripen. I tell myself Skykomish awaits, that I’ll shower and eat and dry out there. The state of my stuff doesn’t matter so much now, I just have to go.

And so I do. I race to Carrot and food and a clean, dry bed. I find her in front of our motel room, smiling in a soft shirt covered in ferns and with hair bleached like the sun. She brought me Indian food in shelf stable pouches, kombucha, baked tofu, iced coffee and salad greens. She carried two huge heavy grocery bags on two busses, complained not even once. She kisses me outside the restaurant, in the hiker lounge at our motel, in the train museum, at the deli, at the post office where I send my microspikes home, in our bed. We touch one another very softly all over and then we take a zero. Bogwitch joins us again, full of their own stories of struggle and rain in the mountains and I am full and dry and content.

Tomorrow, we hike.

—

📍 This section of the Pacific Crest Trail is on unceded Puget Sound Salish and Columbia-Wenatchi land.