From Mt Shasta we walked through Castle Crags Wilderness and onwards, inching towards the California/Oregon border.

There’s one thing that you can’t really escape when thru-hiking the PCT - wildfire. I would love to remember Northern California as a dense, green, lush forest paradise, but these photos would expose my fraud. The reality is that for hundreds of miles the PCT takes you through burn scar, where the charred trunks of dead trees stand guard, waiting for their time to fall.

It’s not all a dusty graveyard of pines though, just look at the polka-dot mushroom trees!