I ate a breakfast of oats, powdered milk, and a crushed-up grocery store donut in my tent, accompanied by a persistent drizzle on the nylon walls. The sky outside was gray and featureless.

Thanks to the trail guide, I knew that the day’s hike would again consist primarily of trudging along logging roads. I set off with one trekking pole and one makeshift trekking pole (the reflector post that I bought in Concrete).

It was a perfect day to put on a long podcast. After I packed up, I jumped back into the middle of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series on World War I. The brutal imagery of the Belgian countryside, bombed to oblivion and devoid of life, mirrored my own surroundings. Dead branches lay discarded in giant heaps in the middle of clearcut forest squares.

To compare hiking through logging roads in Washington to a bombed-out WWI-era Europe is obviously a bit dramatic. There was still life here even besides the mosquitos that swarmed in the aftermath of a clearcut. I found a few banana slugs attempting to cross the gravel road while I stopped to get water from a culvert. Sometime in the afternoon, another barred owl sliced through the air above me.

The drizzle persisted all day. I saw another human being in a logging truck as I crossed the Crown Pacific Mainline Road (probably named after a logging company). The first human I’d seen in two days, I realized afterward.

I made it to a patch of DNR land (shaded blue on the map, fair game for camping) sometime late in the evening. I set up camp right in the middle of the old forest road – the Douglas Fir here was too thick to even consider camping off of the road. I set up camp right where the road split around a boulder and a few trees. The old road here was hard-pack covered in a vibrant layer of puffy green moss. My stakes went in after a huge frustration, and I got my tent propped up just as the drizzle turned into a steady rain. It was actually getting quite cold, so I got in my tent after a speedy dinner and called it a night.