For more than 2,000 miles I was cautious with my food… carrying a bear canister even where it was not required or hanging my food from a tree.
Most other PCT hikers slept with their food inside their tent or used their food bag for a pillow. I thought they were dumb and asking for trouble, and in fact witnessed incidents of bears crashing tents to steal food while terrifying sleeping hikers.
But then 90 miles from the Canadian border and fed up with hanging my food every night, I decided to follow normal PCT practice, and left my food in my pack inside the tent.
The first night, no problem. Same with night two. But around 3am on the third night, I woke up to a rustling noise, and then went back to sleep. The noise woke me up again, and this time I shined my light at the pack down near my feet. A pair of green, beady eyes stared right back at me.
I stunned that poor mouse with a blizzard of cuss words. It scurried around by my feet while I slowly became fully conscious. So now what to do? Fortunately, it wasn’t raining so I pulled out my sleeping bag, pack, clothes. The poor mouse was freaking out and racing up and down the tent looking for a way out. Once all my stuff was out, I started whacking the bottom of the tent with a hiking pole. It scampered out. Now I had to figure out how it got into the tent. I found a two-inch hole which it had gnawed into my expensive Big Agnes tent, and repaired it with Tenacious Tape and then went back to sleep for a couple of hours.
What a pain. The next day at camp I was telling the tale. Another hiker had an even better story. Her mouse friend had twice gnawed its way into her tent. The second time, she trapped it in her titanium cooking pot, put it outside with the lid on so it wouldn’t bother her again that night, and went back to sleep. A true bad-ass.
It isn’t easy to reveal this stupid mistake. I felt like such a dummy, and guilty that the little mouse will need Xanax to recover from the stress of our encounter. At my final resupply in Stehkin a hiker gave me some rope and I hung my food the final five days to the Canadian border.