Episode 64 - PCT Update #12

Chester —> Burney Falls

Oh my GOODNESS gracious, three blogs in one afternoon?! This might be the greatest day of all time! I guess that’s what happens when you finally get a much-needed zero day with access to high-speed (and free) State Park WiFi nearby. Burney Falls Visitor Center, you have my thanks 🤝

As always, please feel free to mail letters, postcards, mail, or care packages to me on trail! I always get so excited heading to the post office, and the next one will be in Seaid Valley (the last town we’re stopping in CA!). Thank you so much to everyone who’s sent me packages (we love baby food pouches and random Trader Joe’s snacks), post cards, and letters so far. Going to the post office is like Christmas, each and every time!

Address:

Dennis Gavrilenko (PCT Hiker)

General Delivery, USPS

44717 CA-96

Seiad Valley, CA 96086

Let’s go!

If this is your first episode and you’re thinking “what in the world is happening right now”, start here!

Burney Falls with Brooke and Sarah! 🌊

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Day 86, 8/4/2025:

15 miles today with 2700 feet of climbing. We’re back on trail, and have arrived in Lassen National Park!

Following our lovely night of sleeping in a Best Western king sized bed, brooke and I woke up feeling well-rested and ready to tackle the day. We had some complimentary hotel waffles for breakfast, I ran to the post office to quickly send Sanketh a book I finished reading, and we were out the door by 10 am, ready to go.

I must also mention that I’ve learned that a post office tells you a lot about a town, and that even small towns with cute post offices mean that it’s likely a quaint place full of kind people. The Chester post office, on the other hand, was quite dilapidated. But I digress.

Once we were packed up, we headed out to the main road to try and get a hitch back to the trail. Fortunately, Star, a German PCT thru-hiker, was already on the road with her thumb out and together, we three got a ride IMMEDIATELY from a pickup truck couple from Chico. They were great, and we had an absolute blast heading back to the trail; turns out, Star works at an audiobook publisher in Berlin and just took a 7-month sabbatical to do this. She’s also half-Palestine (but is very “white-passing”, her words lol) and speaks 5 languages. Wild.

Once at the trail, we took a lovely car selfie, spent another 30 minutes chatting (gossiping, really) at the picnic tables at the trailhead, and finally got back to hiking by noon. It was another day of burnt trees and prickly bushes (I’m SO ready for this to end), called Ariv (no luck getting a Spanish visa for him ☹️), and was basically cruising all the way until camp.

Brooke and I finished hiking by 7 pm so that we can get start hiking earlier in the morning, and going to bed early today is hopefully the start of that quest! At camp, we read another Politically Correct bedtime story with Star, though I was feeling so mentally exhausted that all I could do was stick my head out the tent and listen. Thank you brooke for digging me that cathole 🙏

Day 87, 8/5:

31 miles today with 2700 feet of climbing.

I woke up today with the goal of reaching the Old Station Post Office before it closed at 3 pm. That doesn’t seem like too crazy of a goal, until you learn that this post office is, in fact, 27 miles away, and I’d have to traverse the entire length of Lassen National Park to get there.

Soooo, that meant starting at the dark and early time of 4 am and leaving camp by 4:30. We’d slept right at the southern boundary of Lassen NP (you can’t camp inside the park without a bear can, which we’d already given to Ben and Hailey), and today’s trek went through the entire park, plus another 7ish miles to Old Station.

Right away, the morning was exciting: the southeast portion of the park had several geothermal features, including the giant Boiling Springs Lake and its many boiling mud pools! It was just like Yellowstone, and you could even scoop up and drink the water draining from the lake to make hot chocolate… no need for a JetBoil! Brooke and I then enjoyed a slow breakfast at the Warner Valley Campground just after the boiling lake, and by the time that ended it was 8:30 and time to lock tf in. Old Station was still 23 miles away, and I had only 6.5 hours to make that distance.

For the folks at home, that means hiking at 3.5 mph with a full backpack, for 6 hours straight. Stakes high enough?? Let’s do this darn thing.

Brooke and I agreed to meet at the post office (she had blisters and wanted to hike relatively chill today), so I went ahead and began flying across the park. It was honestly a tremendous time, and I’ve always loved having an extremely intense goal that required my full focus for hours on end (just like in the short story Averted Vision, iykyk), and today was exactly that. I only took two breaks for ~10 minutes each, and had 7 miles to go with 2 hours left until the PO closed. I decided to cut across a different fire road to make it to the highway, since that route was shorter to the post office and, of course, there’d be a chance to hitchhike the last 2 miles to town.

The hitchhiking plan worked perfectly; some glass repair workers gave me a 0.5 mile ride to the main highway (why they were in the middle-of-nowhere forest road, I have no idea), and after hiking a mile along the shoulder, a friendly dude named Bob drove me the last 2 miles to Ild Station. I strolled into the post office at 2:15 pm, with plenty of time to pick up packages and relax. Hallelujah!

The rest of the afternoon passed delightfully: I opened up my three packages (some more Darn Tough socks, Kat you’re the BEST; a letter from Hamburger Helper (I loved your quotes page!), and MY BACKPACKING SPOON THAT I’D FORGOTTEN IN TAHOE YAY I’M REUNITED WITH THE LOVE OF MY LIFE), ate some ice cream from the General Store (the “single scoop” was at least 4 scoops big), wrote some letters and postcards, swam in the river, took a nap, and finished reading 1984. Honestly, the best afternoon ever.

Later, I started chatting with another visitor to Old Station, Dan, who himself had gone to UCLA and was in town for the week with his family. I was offered beer, great conversation, and eventually dinner, which Brooke, Gogh (another PCT hiker), and I gratefully accepted. The best part was showing their grandkids all of our hiking gear and telling them all about the trail; not only were they both tremendously bright and so fun to be with, but they both loved filtering water and filled up all of our bottles. Plus, now that I have my OG backpacking spoon back, us PCT hikers all signed the old plastic one I was using and gifted it to young Amelia :)

What an absolutely amazing day; definitely top-3 on trail for me!

Day 88, 8/6:

23 miles with 1700 feet of climbing today.

Today I learned that one does not truly appreciate something until you’ve been roasting for hours under the blazing sun of Hat Creek Rim, and you spot a small pine tree that beckons you with its shade. Moments like that make me believe in a higher power.

After waking up early and getting a relatively early start, brooke and I headed onward to Hat Creek Rim, a part of the trail famous for being hot af and not having water for 25ish miles… so we had to camel up and carry several liters each. How wonderful. Fortunately, some friendly guy at the gas station gave us TWO ENTIRE BOXES of LMNT electrolyte pouches for free (these boxes are at least $30 each 🤯), though less fortunately, Brooke talked me out of adopting a free kitten from town. There were so many signs advertising them being up for adoption, and I wanted a trail pet SO BAD. Finally, I decided that I can barely take of myself some days, and adding an infant animal to the mix will definitely go poorly. Heart, broken. 💔

I want one so bad 😭

After the gas station break and a fun tourist side trip to the Subway Cave (a tunnel, really, but so so cool!), we proceeded onward to Hat Creek Rim and proceeded to roast all afternoon. I’ve never done well with the heat and was definitely not doing well today, but we made it to the edge of the rim and got picked up by Sarah, Brooke’s hometown friend who came to visit, and together we all drove over to Burney Falls State Park. Our savior! One Chipotle dinner and tons of great conversations later, we went to a late sleep at the backpacking camp for a relaxing morning tomorrow.

And for those who care (me), the Hat Creek Rim is the elevated footwall of a normal fault. Geology is lit. 🪨

Day 89, 8/7:

16 miles with 800 feet of climbing today.

We had a slow morning today with Sarah, and it was heavenly! After waking up at 9, I headed over to the general store to pick up our resupply boxes (somehow they let me pick up Brooke’s, I just told them she was still asleep lol) and had a lovely coffee break on the front porch. This coffee break ended up being so long that brooke and Sarah eventually came over to find me (which they barely did), and by that point we decided to wait for the visitor center to open at 11 am and headed over to the famous Burney Falls.

They were stunning; huge, towering, beautiful, cold, amazing. I highly recommend visiting! We three took some pictures at the lower pools before completing the Falls Loop, then checked out the visitor center (Ariv, that postcard you hid for me was SO COOL!) and headed back to camp. After a long break there, we drove back to where Sarah picked us up the day before, hiked BACK to Burney Falls (which meant that we didn’t need to carry anything but the day’s food, yay for slackpacking!!), and took a nice long lunch break at Baum Lake. Despite our best efforts, we made it back to camp quite late and went to bed at the very-much-not-hiker-midnight 11 pm. Yikes.

Day 90, 8/8:

A zero day! Yay! And that rhymed!

Brooke and I set the alarm this morning for 6 am, ambitiously looking forward to an early start. Looking forward to it last night, at least, which meant that we snoozed that alarm until 8 am this morning and barely got up. Classic us. We eventually got up, decided that we did, in fact, want to wait for Flo and Pablo (who were only a day behind us and coming into the park tonight), so we decided to go ahead and take a zero, despite the fact that we really should be hustling toward Oregon. What a sentence. Oh well! YOLO!

That ended being an amazing decision: I called Armin (a really cool guy I’d met on LinkedIn), had some coffees with Brooke, took a campground shower (very interesting experience), did laundry (translation: brooke did laundry while I provided moral support), checked out a 19th-century cemetery (??), swam in the lake (that was a lot more intense than I’d anticipated because we had to travel across a lagoon to get to the actual beach lol), and had some ice cream. At this point, I’m an expert at this campground’s layout because of how many times I’ve walked to the general store. Flo and Pablo arrived at 8 pm, and we all had an excited gossip session as we caught up about the last few weeks apart.

And, of course, spending a zero at Burney Falls meant ample time chilling near the visitor center and its free WiFi, which explains the three lovely blogs published this afternoon. Enjoy :)

(And PS, I’ve lost so much butt fat from thru-hiking that sitting on a wooden picnic table all day is quiiiiiiite painful lol)