still on track to start tomorrow Castle Crags to Parks Creek Summit

Dallied the morning away at the Dog Trailhead just SW of the State Park, actually making a list (several lists for backpack, daypack, other todo's while with car.)  Finallyaround 1pm  got the main backpack packed and hiked it up the Dog Trail to it's junction with the PCT and found a perfectly invisible spot above the trail to hide it (wrapped in a garbage bag.)  Back down to the car & a stop at the frontage road where there's that I5 spur-trail undercrossing (the trail leading east to the sacramento River portion of Castle Crags park, and west to the main campground, arriving at the bathrooms with the shower.)  Verified that the toilets flushed this time, and took my shower.

Back to the car, took the Creekside drive around to  the east side of the Sacto River and took a peek ant  the park's campground by the river.  The riverside drive continues winding north past the CG through a very dense "old-growth" riparian valley, a single lane road the entire way from where it first crosses the single lane bridge, to it's junction with the road ] that the PCT drops down to off of Girrard Ridge from the east (which I walked a few weeks ago now.)  There are a few turnouts and designated trails to the river from that section of road.  Anyone visiting Castle Crags should be sure not to miss this section of the park.   

On to the Mt Shasta library to write this, before shopping for a few more things... I've totlly shredded my hiking pants and need to find something similar.  Also need to buy some plastic bags, beleive it o not.  I had abunch but seem to have left them in storage in Santa Rosa.  Will probably get big sturdy garbage bags, that I can cut the corners off of to use as "plastic socks" or  "soft snowboots" that I can use with my non-waterproof Lowa hiking boots and my microspikes, in preparation to a few snow-fields I may have to negotiate on the trail.   I did stash my XC-ski poles along with my backpack this time.  I normally hike without hiking poles, but in snow, they  definitely help.  (I could also use them to "self-arrest" if needed, on a steep snowfield.  I've sort of done that on a few occasions in XC Ski trips.)  Not that I'm expecting any significant snow in this section, as I've concluded from my recent scouting drives to the upcomming road summits.

OK, so after I'm done in town I plan to head to the Gumboot road summit, that I'll hit about 20 miles on the trail from I5.  I'm going there to leave myself a food & water cache, for "convenience".   On studying the details of this route, in addition to the major climb from 2200ft to 7800ft, most of the water sources are siignificant off-trail side trips to lakes uphill or downhill from the main trail.  So the 30 mile nominal distance will actually turn out to be more like 40miles.   leaving myself a cache here saves me some pack weight during the first major climbing part of the route, and may save me a side trip in the Gumboot area..

After that I may stop at the McD's in Weed for more internet time and to doublecheck that all my picture data has been offloaded before reformatting my CF cards.   I have managed to charge all my camera batteries and my smartphone batteries (I'm using my smartphone as a mapping-gps.  I'm also using the Holux M241 as a gps track logger. this seems to be working ok as long as I feed it disposable aa batteries - my solar panel doesnt seem to be charging the AA rechargeables enough to use with the Holux.  Grrr!   Niether is the panel keeping up with smart phones power usage to keep it's batteries charged.  Grrr!  Also another problem with my smartphone...  Whenever I reboot it (like when I change batteries) the phone takes FOREVER to "check the storage card's file system" and my main app, BCNAV, is running off the storage card, because this old Nexus-One phone has so little Phone memory that I can have NOTHING extra on it's flash ram... Have been spending a gazzillion hours troubleshooting that problem, to no avail!  Anyway, all that makes my picture geolocation method very sub sub optimal!  I'm also using my old garmin etrex to tracklog, though it usually can't get a strong enough signal from satellites , and its log capacity is very limited.  With three loggers "going", I'm lucky to get a useable log from one of them.  Enough ranting.  

Then I'll head back to the Parks Creek summit (will be about my 5th overnight there, now.  Then tomorrow morning I'll leave my car there and bicycle down to Weed to catch the bus to Dunsmuire then bicycle for one exit on I5 to the PCT, hide my bike, and continue with my daypack through Castle Crags Park, to the Dog trail junction where I've stashed.my main pack.  Swap packs (adding a few things to the main pack from the day pack) then onwards upwards back to the car in probably four days.  This will be Thursday afternoon through the weekend.  Weather calls for some significant "instability over the weekend, especially Saturday, with a 40% chance of rain, up from 20% blurred over the surrounding few days of the earlier forecasts. Hope I'm prepared for it.