Day 6 - Early to Rise Wins the Day — Walking People Out of Poverty

walkingpeopleoutofpoverty.ca is the personal blog of Peter Thorpe, long-time Opportunity International Canada supporter and Walking People Out of Poverty founder. For Dan Murray’s blog and information on OIC, please click here.

Start Time: 6:10 am
End Time 5:00 pm
Start Mileage: 2296.5
End Mileage: 2317.20
Distance Walked: 21.25 miles
Elevation Gain: 2920 feet

After our relaxing zero day, it was time to return to work, and we decided to get off early.

Due to all the rain yesterday, we started our walk in pretty cool temperatures, and it was decidedly misty. We had a half-mile walk on the road to reach the trailhead and were surprised by the amount of vehicles for that time of day on a Sunday morning. We soon reached the trailhead, started our walk through the forest, and were greeted with a gentle climb. This turned into a flat trail which we all enjoyed.

We met several Southbound PCT’ers and stopped to trade intel on the coming trail. It was very misty and evocative as we meandered through the forest with all the mist surrounding us. I don’t think John will be getting any great photos this morning.

Every now and then, the sun broke through, and John quickly took advantage and snapped off a few shots. The trail led us down, down, down until we were at the small river. This was an anonymous sign as we’ve only been on the trail just shy of a week and know the telltale signs.

We sensed there was an ascent in our future. The trail led us directly to the small river, which we had to cross, but there was no easy way. John found a large tree up the river and led the way across. This is where the trail started to climb, and we went up, up, up. It was relentless, and suddenly, the sun combined our misery by appearing. It was hot! The upside of the sun making an appearance was John could give his camera a workout.

It is remiss of me not to tell you about the great time we had this morning. We knocked out the first 10 miles by 10:50 am, and just before noon, we had reached 12 miles. We were all elated and pleased with our efforts. We reached the original campsite we had targeted by 3 pm, which was too early to stop walking, so we decided to push on.

The next campsite was a further 3.7 miles, so we decided to push on and arrived at 5 pm. This is the earliest we arrived at a camp, and were delighted with our efforts. An early start pays off, and we plan on doing the same tomorrow.

Now for some pictures.