I woke up feeling fresh and ready to hike again. The previous day, Bugs and Moose had met some random person who volunteered to give us all a ride up the highway back to the PNT. So the three of us met on the porch of the hotel and waited for our ride.

When our ride pulled up, I got up from the plastic lawn chair I was sitting in to realize that somehow my phone had been wedged under the leg of my chair the whole time I was sitting there. The screen was totally unresponsive. In a semi-panicked state, I told Bugs and Moose to go on without me, and that I would catch up with them the next day. I wasn’t relying on my phone for anything except for the trail guidebook (useful but not mandatory) and e-books for reading at night (extremely nice to have). However, Bonner’s Ferry would be the biggest trail town until Anacortes, Washington, which was 800 miles down the trail.

So I used Bugs’s phone quickly to get the number of the nearest phone repair shop, which was 100 miles down US 95 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. After they rode off, I used the motel reception desk’s phone to call the repair shop and make sure they had the right parts to fix my model.

With little time to lose, I got out to the highway and started hitching. I had two days to catch up with Bugs and Moose, or else I would have to do the bushwhack alone.

The hitches came quick - I got three separate hitches and made it to Coeur d’Alene around noon, and turned my phone in to the repair store. It took them about 3 hours, during which time I walked over to an outfitter to try to find a replacement hiking pole (they didn’t have any; basically all outfitters from Eureka to Anacortes are hunting/fishing/golfing stores), then sat in a Starbucks and eavesdropped on some people conducting an incredibly fake-sounding job interview.

It was late afternoon when I got my phone back - now I just had to make it back to the trail before dark. Catching a hitch back up to Bonner’s Ferry was pretty rough to begin with. I was hitching from the middle of a suburban strip mall hellscape, which is one of the worst places one can try to hitch from. My strategy was to stand next to a right turning lane, sticking out my thumb and pointing north to make it clear which direction I was trying to go.

I eventually got picked up by someone who had hiked the AT about five years previously, then moved out to Idaho for a job that didn’t pan out. He was a recovering alcoholic, and spent about 80 miles telling me about his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous. He had been sober for about 2 years, and it was really cool to hear his story about addiction and sobriety. He was totally emotionally open with me in a way that I am not used to seeing from a stranger.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t take me all the way back to Coeur d’Alene, but the last two hitches came quickly enough. I rode back with a very-laid-back, long-haired 18-year-old kid who ended every sentence with “bro”, and then an older, nearly-deaf man who tried to convert me to his religion (not sure what religion exactly, He worshipped Jesus, but insisted that I call God by His true name: Adonai Elohenu). The older man dropped me off on Copeland Rd (0249P). It was around 7 p.m. and I was a six-mile roadwalk away from the trailhead.

After that whirlwhind of a day, and yet another three-day stretch in weird towns, I was so ready to be back on trail. About five miles down the road, right near the trailhead where I planned to camp, I met a bird photographer who chatted with me for a while to warn me about the mountain lions that frequent the mountain I would be hiking over. I took his advice lightly at first, but then he showed me a picture he had taken just the previous day, in exactly the spot we were standing in, of a mountain lion pinning down an elk calf in the middle of the road.

That was not exactly what I wanted to hear as the sun was dipping below the horizon. I thanked him for the info and went to find a spot to camp.

It was nearly dark by the time I made it to the trailhead (0255.2P), but I didn’t have my headlamp turned on yet. I saw a side trail that looked promising as far as a camping spot, and started walking down it when I saw a large figure crashing through the brush toward me. I yelped and jumped in the air as the figure turned on his headlamp, and without missing a beat, said, “Hi, I’m Rocks!”, sticking out his elbow for a friendly thru-hiker elbow bump. Rocks and I chatted for a couple of minutes, and he pointed me to a flat spot across the stream where I could set up.

It had been an incredibly successful day. I hitchhiked about 200 miles, got my phone screen fixed, and hiked just far enough that I would be able to catch up with my friends the next day. As I was drifting off to sleep in my tent, I thought I caught a faint whiff of cat urine.