Day 142- 23 short miles today but I’m totally loving these shorter days. It was a nice day, I listened to some podcast and went for an awesome dip during lunch at a lake. Basically in Washington, lakes were my showers. For being such a mellow day it flew by….like all the days so now. Washington is so beautiful and green, but I can’t wait to get back to the mountain peaks. The trail passed by a ton of lakes today. None of which were super amazing, even the one I ate lunch at was just….there. Large logs lay across the bottom of all of them. I’m clearly getting spoiled. Towards the end of the day we all hiked into camp together. We came across the campsites at Dewey Lakes, and when we arrived another hiker was there. We said hello, but he didn’t really respond. He looked pissed that we were there. But it was a campsite for 5 tents and he was one person so it wasn’t a big deal we were there. But his energy through us off so we split up and tried to find something else. Having no luck we asked if he would mind if we camped here, and that we all just sleep in our bags. He got rude and was making comments about the campsite and how we weren’t supposed to sleep so close to the water. But it was a referenced campsite so we were good with it. He ended up leaving. Which I didn’t care, but that was the first time on this whole trail that another hiker has been so weird and rude. We were freaked a little after he left, but nothing happened. We started out a little spread apart for some random reason, but got a little freaked by random noises so scootched a bit closer. It was super funny. I haven’t laughed this hard the whole trail. I legit cried laughing and now my abs hurt. We kept hearing a really funny noise that we decided was an elk mating call. And we all kept trying to mimic it, then joked that a male Elk was going to show up and be pissed there’s no lady Elk for him there. The noise started as a low pitch whistle that got louder followed by a deep “eeeeeeaaaaahhhh” noise. Throughout the rest of the trail we came to reference ghost elks and make the noise when trying to find each other. That along with “but that’s half way down the river” we’re the two biggest inside jokes. During the night we would hear the calls then a splash. Apparently the Elk wanted to bathe too. Or they were swimming to the other side. It’s so Smokey here right now. It hurts to breathe, and my eyes are irritated a bit. Tomorrow we will get to Chinook Pass where we will find out the current trail conditions, and most likely have to skip from here to where the trail reopens….super bummed to be missing more trail and such amazing parts of it as well. But I realize it is not good to be breathing this air in at all either. I just wish things would stop burning. I thought this wouldn’t be a worry this year due to all the rain, but since that caused so much overgrowth then heated up all fast, well here we are. And we passed the 2300 mile mark today!