"Fire on the mountain! Run APES run!" Mile 1506-1606

So as we drove back to Chester, CA to drop our car off and start hiking again we found out that there were A LOT of wildfires that had started a couple of days earlier.  There was a big lightning storm with over 950 confirmed strikes but no rain so Northern California and Southern Oregon were quite a bit smokey!  Since the PCT was closed at Hat Creek Rim and Burney Falls due to fires we thought that we could just road walk and continue on but the road through Burney Falls State Park was closed because....... you guessed it!  More fire!  So we found some fantastic Trail Angels in Lake Shastina who let us leave our car at their house and we skipped 170 miles ( we plan on coming back to get these miles) to get past the fires and started back on the trail at Dunsmuir.

The smoke made for some pretty sunrises and for some nuclear winter type overcast days.

Smoke down in the valleys and working its way into the mountains.  Later this day  the smoke got really thick and made us ponder how many packs worth we had been sucking down.

Do you know what this means?  Yep, time to road walk.  

Almost Awesome in the kitchen!  We had a 20 mile road walk that started at 3 pm so we had to get creative when we rolled into the sleepy community of Callahan. This quaint little place rolls up it's sidewalks at 5 pm and the store/deli adheres to the common Western societal practice of being closed on Tuesdays.  So we toe'd the line of thru-hiker and vagabond and soaked our food and set up camp under the "town" bridge.

So what does a roadwalk look like, you ask?  A lot of this.

We stopped in to resupply in Etna and we stayed a few hours at the Hiker Hut, which was great.  One thing we learned there was to never joke about Bloody Marie's because ... POOF!... they will just appear out of nowhere.  Us enjoying a refreshment with our new friends (L-R) Reverend Blister, Dust Bunnie, and Ninja.

As long as we weren't enveloped by it, the smoke was rather pretty.