July 17

Distance today: 7.1 miles

Mile marker: 259.5

Our resupply package awaits at the Summit Inn at Snoqualmie Pass. We woke up in our lakeside tent site. Fish were jumping our of the water to catch their breakfast. But they didn’t eat enough mosquitoes as we had to swat them away as we packed up camp.

We started with a modest climb then went through the famous Kendall Catwalk in the morning sun.

We reached the trailhead a little after 11am. The trail down was fairly nice, but some rockier sections brought back nightmares of yesterday.

When we drove from Colorado to Washington to start the hike, we stopped at the Snoqualmie trailhead to peak at our future. And now we’ve returned! Try to guess which picture is from today during the hike and which is from three weeks ago before we started hiking.

And we saw a pika starting their very busy day! There have been a lot of pika and marmot in this stretch. They mostly yell at us for invading their territory.

We got to the hotel and the hiker box was filled with food. We snagged some tuna for lunch (B-). Good protein, but totally lacking calories. The hotel let us do a SUPER early check-in and let us into our room before noon. We were most grateful.

After a brief rest and long showers, we were greeted by guests! Jason’s mom and a former scoutmaster drove up to greet the weary hikers and bring them goodies. We got Gatorade, oranges, fresh blueberries, chocolate milk, and Taco Time chicken burritos. It was a feast! Jason’s mom also delivered some Shoe Goo and sewing needles to make some gear repairs.

After catching up, they let us on with our reorganization and craft projects. Although the super glue had held well enough, Alex re-glued the tread of her shoes back together with the newly acquired Shoe Goo, hoping for a fix that will survive the next 200 miles. Jason touched up the toes of his shoes where the rocks were beginning to fray the rubber.

Jason also did some reinforcement on his backpack. Jason has an Osprey Exos Pro. It’s an ultralight pack, but still has the Osprey suspended back support. The issue is that the support rods were rubbing on the back panel fabric behind the back support and wearing holes, especially when the pack was full. Since the field repair done a few days ago was holding and reorganizing inside the pack stopped the major wear points, Jason decided he didn’t need a new pack (yet, at least) and instead would reinforce where the wear occurred. He’s had several days to think about it, so he decided to cut some of the nylon webbing from the waist strap and sew that to the back panel of the pack. We’ll see how it holds up or if any new issues pop up, but it seems like it’ll hold up for a while longer.

We packed our new foods and goodies into our packs and had our last remaining dehydrated meal for dinner: chicken taco surprise (B+). Tomorrow should be relatively easy, but rain is forecasted for later in the week.