Escape! - ~2330mi to campo

Well, we hiked out today, via the old and underused Fog trail. Descend on the trail for a while before losing it in the snow, then had to resort to following game trails to make our way down the rest of the moderately steep slope to get the an old logging road that would dump us out on Hwy 410. There was, on the map, a campground there called Morse Creek Campground, at which I figured we'd be able to get a phone call made, or at the very least pick up some water. It turns out that campground is gone - doesn't appear to exist anymore! So we started hiking up the highway, towards Chinook Pass about 8 miles away. The blazing sun overhead certainly didn't help. Strangely enough, we couldn't pay someone to pick us up. Hitchhiking attempts for 2 hours resulted in nothing more than stares as we plugged our way uphill. It's wierd, we're out in the middle of nowhere, 50 miles from the closest town, and nobody would stop to help. Wouldn't you stop to help two nice looking hikers on the side of the road? I started to joke that maybe Arij should lie down on the ground and I'd start performing CPR... maybe somebody would stop. Scarily enough, I wouldn't be surprised if people drove right on by. FINALLY, somebody did stop. Arij will point out that they did because they were military - a guy and his wife from Ft Lewis stopped and picked us up. We were sooo grateful to finally get picked up. They drove us up to the pass, but there were no phones there. They were looking for a gas station anyways, so they just took us with them to the little town of Greenwater (could a backwater town name be any more obvious?). We placed a few strategic phone calls and arranged for our rescue. After looking online tonight it appears that there's a major fire closure along the PCT where it starts at the Washington-Oregon border, so we may have to skip all the way ahead to Timberline Lodge, Mt Hood, Oregon. That would be section 4, so we'd be cutting out segments 2 and 3 (and about 200 miles). Not too bad, I suppose.

We learned a few things in this section. Most importantly, that we can definately do this. Even with dealing with major routefinding issues and snowy trails, we managed to pull off 17 mile days. Imagine how fast we would have been going on clear trail! We're going to get to campo.