7/3/17 to 7/4/17 – Happy July 4th

Days: 71 and 72

Miles: 0

Our first zero day at Mt. Shasta was a typical town stop with chores being done for most of the day. 
Food hunting turned to be challenging, mostly because I’m getting little tired of the typical items we’ve been eating for last 800 miles. If this was an ideal year, we would have hike a section where we buy food and then there would be a section for which we have a box prepared with our home made food to spark things up. But it’s not an ideal year, we skipped our entire box section and we will be buying for at least couple hundred more miles. Mt. Shasta surprisingly does not have a great selection of hiker friendly food but between three grocery stores, I managed to vary my meals slightly so I’m going to eat something more exciting in the next 6 hiking day, I hope.

Otherwise we enjoyed the town and it’s festive atmosphere. Walking on the main street we were surrounded by vendors and tempting scent of fresh food like baby ribs or teriyaki, and live music including band on stage and several smaller street acts. I especially enjoyed the photography and painting displays portraying local scenes. If we are lucky I might be able to capture similar images during our hike to Etna. The stretch is supposed to be very scenic and I’m looking forward to it, though we are not going to get break from the heat. The temperature is forecasted to be in mid 90´s again next week. 

We didn’t really need to take to zeros, and part of me feels little guilty about not making trail miles, but there was a big parade going on in Mt. Shasta today and fireworks to celebrate 4th of July, and since our chores were done, we could spend the entire day chilling and enjoying the atmosphere.

Large crowd gathered at Mt. Shasta Resort, one of the prime locations to watch the fireworks. We grabbed a burger and a drink and found our spot on the super comfortable thick grass from where we enjoyed the show.