Last night was very pleasant. BC built a fire which always livens up the night. There weren’t as many unexplained night sounds from the tents around us. No farts, no snoring, it was eerily quiet. Until some idiots alarm went off full blast at 6:15. Bunny needs to show me how to adjust the volume.
As usual, Wolf was first out with Ivy about 10 minutes behind. Bunny and I left at 8:05 which is quickly becoming our standard departure time. Blue’s Clues was still in his tent. He was awake but knew that he had an easy day ahead of him since we are only planning on 10 miles. I knew he’d be in camp a couple hours before us, so I told him to have a fire going when we arrived.
The trail started out just like it finished yesterday—washed out. Even though we were planning on a short mileage day, it was a tough hiking day with the first 4 miles of bushwhacking and a total elevation gain today of 4400’. It may not sound bad to young legs, but geriatric legs were quivering in anticipation of exhaustion.
Before we had gone 2 miles, Blue’s Clues passed us. We were at a stream crossing where Bunny had just taken a hard fall. The night before last we had met Jigsaw who told us about his fractured knee cap. When he fractured it, the tendons pulled the pieces up and down in his leg because they are so tightly attached. Bunny had fallen hard on her knee and elbow and I was checking to see if her cap was where it should be or somewhere up in her mid-thigh. Fortunately, nothing was broken but it gave us both a scare.
After another mile of scrambling, I was completely out of energy. We dropped our packs and I headed down to the creek to get some water when I fell. I thought I might have broken my little finger but I just tore our new CNOC bag. This day is taking a high toll: Bunny’s knee and elbow, my pinkie, and our water bag…and it’s not even 10, yet.
We did finally make it to good trail running in the valley, but now it was hot. We’re climbing out of the desert into an alpine zone and we’re passing through a transition zone that has recently been burned. The only trees are dead and burnt but haven’t fallen yet. The cacti look like they are dying (I’m assuming from too much water). It was just not a pretty or pleasant walk.
Bunny doesn’t like to stop for lunch until we’ve hiked at least half of the miles we have planned for the day. We came to an unexpected stream about 6.5 miles in and I was ready for fuel. We ran into Wolf just finishing up his lunch break. He agreed with us that this was not turning into the easy day we had hoped for. He took off and we took a lunch break. When we were finishing, the lead hiker of a group of 9 weekend warriors we had leapfrogged with yesterday, caught up to us. We told them where we were headed for the night, but didn’t see any of them the rest of the day.
The final 4.5 miles were just a steady grind uphill. I just had no energy and was barely shuffling along. We did run into a group of 4 middle aged men that were walking even slower than us. Our people are starting to show up on the trail. We chatted for a bit and then kept plodding on to our rendezvous. We even caught a glimpse of Wolf ahead of us so that tells us that either he might be hurting and tired, or, he has embraced the freedom of leisure. I can’t believe 28 years of military life followed by 9 years of DIA work can be turned around over night. It makes us feel a little better that he’s feeling today as well.
We got to camp at 4. 8 hours to go less than 11 miles. BC did have a fire going as I had requested. We set up our tents and cooked supper. Wolf just went to his tent and didn’t come back out. While we were eating around the campfire, more thru-hikers started showing up and joining us. Bunny and I managed to stay up until almost 7 but we decided to leave all the youngins unsupervised and went to bed. Even though the sun is still up, the temperature is dropping. The smart, old folk can anticipate a cold night around 8000’ with patches of snow all around camp.
EFG