Day 112 - Tuesday, August 17

Tenting at Windigo Pass (mile 1878.3). Walked 22.2 miles today.

We woke up this morning and a glance outside the tent showed that we were in the clouds this morning.

Taking a breath also told us that the Air Quality Index was high: the air was smokey. As we had cell signal here, we verified our assumption. The index was almost 200 which is "Very Unhealthy". I could hear Frank coughing from her tent. It was also unexpectedly cold this morning. We got ready to go and then huddled together to stay warm while we decided what to do about the smoke. We decided to wait a bit and see if it for better. Meanwhile, we took naps as we were still really tired. Frank in particular didn't sleep well last night due to a combination of my snoring, continual rockslides from the mountain, and an animal wandering around outside (we later identified it as a bobcat based on the call Frank heard).

We finally got up again around 10 when the air quality had significantly improved and got fully packed up before going down to the stream to get some water.

After getting water, we headed out with a goal of getting 22 miles in today. We need to do as many as possible as we're meeting Kaurine about 150 miles up the trail on Saturday, meaning we'll have to do some big miles coming up. We set off into the trees, westing our puffy jackets and after a climb, we reached the PCT high point for both Oregon and Washington, meaning this is as high as we'll be for the rest of the trail.

After a photoshoot, we hiked on, seeing very few hikers. We took a brief lunch and continued on through more and more woods for the rest of the afternoon.

I took my puffy off for a couple of hours, but regretted it because I eventually got really cold. Frank checked the weather and saw that it was supposed to be around 40 degrees tonight...yikes. We finally reached the water cache and road at Windigo Pass just after 8 pm and we quickly set up camp. We decided that because it would be cold tonight and neither of us have cold weather gear that we would share my tent tonight in hopes that our combined body heat would keep us warm enough. Let's hope that's actually the case.