There was a single 4000-foot descent between me and the road to Sedro-Wooley, where I planned to take a half-day of rest. Large descents like this are often quite tough – the shock of each step rattles my brain and by the end my legs feel wobbly and weak. However, this was a logging road, so the grade needed to be shallow enough for large trucks to make it into the mountains. So it was an easy descent until the very end.

I bypassed a metal vehicle gate close to where the forest road met a paved road. Down the hill further, I saw someone walking somewhere between 6 and 10 large dogs off-leash. As soon as they saw me, they all dashed toward me, barking and snapping at me. I reflexively crouched and put my hands over my head while they all surrounded me. One of them bit me on the elbow and they all surrounded me barking for a few seconds before responding to the dog-walker calling them off. I was so angry and hurt that I didn’t even know what to say. The person didn’t even apologize. I just stormed past them.

That incident set the tone for the rest of my morning. I was in an awful mood. I stood at the side of the road with my thumb out in the drizzle for about an hour. There was a church across the road that let out around noon, and one of the churchgoers ended up giving me a ride into Sedro-Wooley.

Once in town, I was lucky enough to find an outdoor outlet in a park. The sun came out and I spread out my tent and quilt to dry off. I wasn’t there long before I saw two familiar figures in the distance coming up the rail trail. I waved excitedly to Morning Star and Cookie Monster. We hugged and gossipped and quickly traded stories and itineraries. It had been a few weeks since I’d seen them in Oroville. I had tracked their footprints through much of the Pasayten Wilderness, and they got behind me when they hitched to a town near Ross Lake. They arrived in Concrete right after I left and took the rail trail out.

Cookie Monster and Morning Star had already hiked the whole Puget Sound section of the trail in June, so they were skipping it and spending some time with a friend from their PCT hike. That friend arrived to pick them up only about 15 minutes later, and we made plans to stay in contact and rendezvous again on the Olympic Peninsula.


I made a quick, uneventful resupply in the afternoon. In the evening, I sat at a bar in town to grab a beer and attempted to send an email update to friends and family. My last update had been in Eureka, Montana. So much had happened since then that it felt impossible to articulate. The writer’s block was overwhemling… I think I got like four sentences in over the course of an hour. So that email never got sent, and Update #1 was my last update.

I left the bar slightly tipsy from the single beverage, disappointed by my inability to write anything, and ravenously hungry. A Domino’s down the street radiated warmth and light. The Pearly Gates. I ordered a small pizza with mushrooms and banana peppers, quickly set up my tent on a nearby piece of land that looked forgotten, and came back to the Domino’s to claim my greasy prize.

Honestly? Those folks make pretty good pizza.