Day 155:(20.44 miles)
mile 2355.48 – 2375.92

After a warm and dry night in the Urich Cabin we set out to make big miles so we could reach Snoqualmie in two days. The low cloud from yesterday sat above us and it seemed just a matter of time before it would rain. We prepared by hiking with our rain pack covers already on and our rain gear on the top of our packs. Sure enough it wasn’t long before it started to drizzle. On went the rain gear and we walked in “on again, off again” rain/ drizzle all morning. We had been on a slow climb in the Dark Forest just before noon when we were surprised by a cooler of sodas and three chairs.

Magic!! The rain had lowered our spirits, so the magic is just what we needed. Brock, Socks and Sugar joined us. We had a short bitch session about the the weather and concluded with, “it could be snowing”! We meandered through the day with not much of a view of anything because the cloud sat on us the whole day. Late in the day we were approaching Tacoma Pass and a forest road where we found another cooler with soda and Rainer beer. Being late in the day with the temperature dropping fast we opted to take a “soda to go”. The next place to camp was at the top of the pass, a 1500ft climb. We decided it was better to get it over today and be left with 27 miles to Snoqualmie. Up we climbed as the heaviest rain of the day began to come down. We reached the pass and tucked in between tall bushes and a few trees and put up the tent when the rain slowed for about ten minutes. We threw everything in our tent as quickly as we could unpack it from our bags, and just in time as it started to pour heavily.  By that time we were nearly frozen with teeth chattering.  We’ve noticed that the rain in Washington is different  from Oregon…it’s COLD and chills you to your core.  Huddling inside our tent we made hot meals and hot apple cider as the wind and rain raged outside. Even before we fell asleep the wind was gusting such that we thought our tent was going to blow over, but it held fast.
Our only problem was that after we had eaten, we both had to pee, but it was raining so hard we couldn’t risk going out for fear the interior would become soaked as well. This is going to be a rough night.