I woke up feeling pretty much the same as yesterday if not a little bit worse. Great. We also had to get up before 5am because we had to do 8 miles before 8:30am. That’s when a trail angel that Stefi organized would pick us up and give us a ride around a burn zone. There were some climbs to start with but I was really trying to push although I was feeling like shit. Somehow my legs were not listening to me so it took me some time to warmup. In the end Stefi asked the trail angel to pick us up at 9am insted just so we would have more time. Eventually we got to the road at 8:40am so almost made it. We met there another hiker – Spooky – that asked us if she can join. The next section is a recent burn zone with a lot of blow downs and almost no markers and shade. The PCTA advised hikers to go around it and it the 35 degrees Celsius that’s exactly what we decided to do. The trail angel and his wife even brought us cold sodas and water for the ride! So lovely.

After an hour we got to the trailhead from where it was safe again to continue. We stopped shortly because there were a lot of pine cones everywhere and we decided to make our own 2 000 km marker because there were none in the burn zone that we went around. Yes, we are getting closer to halfway baby! Once we hit the top we took a lunch break and then it was mostly downhill. Well the last 7 miles were only completely downhill. It was already getting quite late but we decided to push and make it all the way down to Belden where we wanted to camp. To our surprise there was a festival happening on the bottom so when we got there there was a lot of people both hikers and festival visitors. I was told it was mostly EDM music so basically something where you have to be on drugs to fully enjoy it. No thank you. I would have liked to check it out but I was still feeling pretty sick. Me and Stefi just grabbed a cold dinner and then cowboy camped because it was still so so hot. Around 27 degrees Celsius at 10pm but so humid! It was insane. Nevertheless I was really exhausted so I fell asleep almost instantly.