Day 75

Buff Baby’s birthday! Another fun one today, though much more of the type 2 variety. We woke up at 3:30 so that we could beat what we were told would be temperatures in the mid 90s on a thirty mile section of trail—the Hat Creek rim—with essentially no shade. We aimed to walk thirty five miles to the Burney Mountain Guest Ranch, where cold drinks and an all you can eat dinner awaited.

Naturally, there is a thirty two mile dry stretch after Old Station. Fortunately, a farmer maintains a water tank for hikers, and the morning hiking to get here was quite smooth. The trail along the rim was pretty, with my last views of Lassen and my first of Shasta, and the weather was cool.

The hiking after the water tank was brutal: extremely hot and extremely sun exposed. I slammed an electrolyte packet with 100 mg of caffeine and flew ahead of the rest of the group, hoping to find tree cover before the heat worsened. I didn’t, but fortunately thunderheads rolled in around nine miles from the ranch, completely blocking the sun and thus allowing me to take my shirt off and hike the remaining few hours just as fast as the last few. By my watch, I walked at three and a half miles per hour from the tank to the ranch. With the shade, I was able to enjoy the African plains type environment I had been marching through all day.

I made it to the guest ranch at 4, just as it started to rain. I was handed a cold ginger beer, bought some junk food and more soda in their store, and relaxed on the porch while waiting for my friends to arrive. Dinner— tacos, enchiladas, an excellent salad bar, and soft serve ice cream with zucchini bread—was divine, though I punished myself with three salads, two bowls of melon, and three plates of tacos, rice, and beans, so the walk to our campsite was much closer to a hobble. Sleeping in tomorrow before soft serve at Burney Falls!