After a couple days of packing more stuff than it seems possible to need in an entire lifetime, Noah and I headed out this morning to drive south to Campo, Calif., the starting point of the Pacific Crest Trail, so he can start walking on Wednesday.

It rained some, and then it rained more, and then it sleeted, and then it snowed. It came down, in one form or another, all the way from Creswell down to past Redding, where it rained so hard for a while that cars and trucks crashed all over the freeway. We passed a new white pickup that had rolled into the ditch and lay on its side, its headlights still bright in the downpour.

Finally, around Red Bluff, we managed to find sunshine, though of the cold and windy kind.

We stopped for an hour at Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge to walk the trails and drive the gravel-road vehicle loop, then holed up in a Ramada for the evening in the small town of Williams, north of Sacramento. At dinner at a deli next to the freeway, we heard an old man tell his wife and another couple how he’d once hiked 20 miles in a single day...

Noah will have to average 22 miles a day for four months straight to make it to the Canadian border before the snow starts to come down this fall.

Tomorrow: Southern California.
Tuesday: The Mexican border, and maybe lunch or dinner in the Mexican town of Tecate (we brought our passports in case we’re not too weirded out by the border wars).
Wednesday: Noah starts walking north.