Each morning is a competition to see how fast we can get ready for the day. Every minute counts. Every task can be optimized, perfected and reduced to its bare essentials.

We go to bed cold, sleep cold and wake up cold. Overnight the socks I was trying to dry froze. For the first time, I press snooze on my alarm clock.

The trail follows the ridge between rock faced peaks. At points, it’s clear that the trail is man made - many rocks are staked on top of each other to build up the trail against a rock cliff.

We were both super snuggled up and all was great until morning when we woke in a cloud. Yup, fog had entered the valley removing visibility and soaking our sleeping bags and everything else that was exposed.

We are camped two miles from our first trail town, Mt. Laguna. Mt. Laguna is a small mountain town with a restaurant, convenient store, post office and a few motels. The town lays parallel to the PCT, so we will leave the trail to walk through the town before returning to the PCT further ahead. Town means one wonderful thing - we can get clean.

The US-Mexico border was easy to see from far away as a 500-mile, 30 foot tall fence marked the spot in the sand. We had woken up at 4:45am, packed our bags, ate breakfast and then a volunteered picked us up to drive us to the monument right at the border.