I snuck out of Lys and Dan’s house and bright and early, all charged up and ready to go. A Safeway at the southwest corner of town had everything I needed for a quick resupply; I sat on the curb outside for my usual food-repacking ritual. By this time I was getting extremely tired of eating tortillas, so I opted for much bulkier loaves from the bakery section of the grocery. It was a four-day resupply until I’d make it to Hurricane Ridge, where hopefully I could catch a hitch into Port Angeles for another resupply.

I picked up the PNT route again at a marina across the street from the safeway. The route would take me on a bike path that eventually joined up with highway 20, where I intended to hitch 9 miles until the next non-death-trap road (someone on the Guthook app called this “the most skippable 10 miles of the PNT”).

The bike path walk was uneventful except for The Stink. The person on the ferry had warned me correctly. I actually saw it before I smelled it: A sickly pink-gray mist hovering above the bay, unmoving. Unfortunately, the bike path wandered directly into the Stink Zone. For about four miles I was tormented by the nauseating byproducts of the Kraft Process. With no exaggeration, it smelled like pure death, worse than I had ever smelled it before. I never got used to it, but I eventually waded out of the stench cloud as I neared the end of the bike trail.

I started hitching at Four Corners (1009P) and got picked up immediately by a guy who spent the hitch telling me about the motorcycle he bought for his mid-life crisis. He dropped me off at the intersection of 20 and 101 at a horrid greasy spoon called Fat Smitty’s. Fat Smitty was a 10-foot-tall statue of some guy next to an equally-tall statue of a hamburger and Coca-Cola bottle. I had to go to the bathroom really badly, so I entered the crowded restaurant and pushed my way into the back before coming out to the ice cream window for a soft-serve cone.

The restaurant-goers stared at me relentlessly as I continued trying to hitch down highway 101. There was only one area for cars to pull out, and that was directly in Fat Smitty’s. So I stood there for about half an hour, confidently sticking my thumb out into the highway in full view of every outside patron of tha fine establishment. Finally I got picked up by a late-80s or early-90s Chevy Astro van driven by an woman in her mid-60s who talked at length about her experience being trans in small-town Washington.

My driver dropped me off at the strange little forest road that would lead me into Olympic National Park. I was now attempting to follow the map I had picked up at the PNTA office in Sedro-Wooley, which looked something like this:

My copy, however, did not yet have the route explanation in the top-left. This would make my navigation quite a bit more challenging – I didn’t realize that I was supposed to be following pipeline clearcuts rather than actual forest roads along the black route. Even worse, none of the forest roads I found were actually marked on my USGS map. So I ended up doing a full depth-first search of this tree of old forest roads, continuing on each branch until I was sure that it went in the wrong direction, getting more annoyed and frustrated with every backrack. I finally made it to my target road via some roundabout method that never even vaguely made sense to me; maybe it was a wormhole or some kind of strange loop.

I regained a bit of confidence once I saw a big Olympic National Forest sign. I still had a bit of roadwalking to do before I’d make it to the Mount Zion trail. A stratus cloud had rolled over, darkening the sky and letting out a pleasant drizzle.

I stopped on the side of the forest road to filter water under a culvert (a process that took some time due to slippery vegetation and a very steep ditch). While I took a break there, a family of about six people on separate four-wheelers rolled up to me and asked what the hell I was doing on foot, and whether I needed help. I explained what the hell I was doing, and we talked for a good while. The ATV family was from Discovery Bay and apparently came up here all the time, but they had never heard of or seen the Mount Zion Trail at the top of the forest road. This did not exactly inspire confidence. I triple-checked my maps and we collectively agreed I was in the right place.

We said our goodbyes and they zoomed up the hill. I continued behind them with 15 minutes of silence or so before they came zooming back to tell me excitedly that there was, in fact, a Mount Zion Trail at the top of the forest road, and they couldn’t believe they’d never seen it before.

Once I finally made it up to the junction, I could definitely see why they’d never stumbled upon it. The trailhead was something you wouldn’t find unless you were specifically looking for it – a faded old sign marked the start of the trail, and it was just a narrow path leading into the woods, partially obscured by plant growth.

Finally, for the first time in many miles, I was back on a proper trail in a living forest. It was quiet here, and moss covered the open forest floor as far as I could see. I still had a few hours until dark, and I took a long break to appreciate the stillness of this forest.

I happily climbed up the side of Mount Zion along this trail, which grew narrower and narrower due to encroaching rhododendrons toward the top. There was no view from the clearing at the top of the mountain due to thick fog, but I enjoyed a ramen dinner there before setting up camp at an established tent site nearby. There was even an old pit toilet up there, but it was barricaded shut with logs and sticks. The approaching darkness started to psych me out a little bit, and I imagined that there was probably a dead body in there, but no way was I going to check.

I awoke at 3 AM to the sound of repeated gunshots coming from the east. This magnified my fear to an extreme level, and I quietly planned what I would do in a scenario where I heard someone coming up the trail. I was determined not to end up as another dead body stashed in the pit toilet.

The shooting eventually stopped about an hour later, which made me even more freaked out (were they now hiking up the trail at full speed to come murder me?). I preemptively unzipped my tent so that I could make a silent escape if needed. Of course, nothing ever happened, and I managed to doze off again for a couple of hours.