Date: 7/25/20
Daily Miles: 28
Total Miles: 639
It rained pretty good overnight, but luckily again it had stopped by the time we were getting up. The sky was still filled with grey clouds, but at least we weren’t getting wet.
We came to our first water for the day within 20 minutes of walking. Even though it was so early, and still cool out, we stopped to do laundry. We figured that if it was going to be overcast all day, our laundry would need as much time as possible to dry on our packs.
The trail today was very easy walking. There were a lot of miles of dirt road walking. That can get a bit boring after awhile, but the silver lining is that we can get a lot of miles done quickly. At lunchtime, we figured we would get a lot of miles done and still make it into camp early for a relaxing evening (that was not how it turned out).
We were surprised to get another dose of trail magic today. Gummybear was on one of the dirt roads with Gatorade and chips. It was a nice pick-me-up in the morning.
In the afternoon, we met a woman who was section hiking the CDT. Her trail name was Old Lady Hiker, which just seemed really sad. She told us about the trail after it splits from the CT, and her information wasn’t very encouraging. It seems we have a pretty hard stretch in front of us after Lake City.
As we were getting ready to stop for dinner, we started to hear thunder. We put up a tarp to sit under while we cooked dinner. The rain started just as we were packing up after dinner. We decided to wait out the rain, since it was still fairly early and we were only planning to go another mile or so.
It ended up raining really hard and really long. We were under the tarp for close to two hours. We were all so uncomfortable after that amount of time, that by the time the rain lessened a bit, we decided to make a play and head out into the light rain.
The walking was fine, but unfortunately, the terrain was not great for finding a camping spot…it was either too sloped, or the only trees were aspen with a three inch diameter (way too small to hang from). So, we kept walking into the dark. We eventually made it to a trailhead around 9pm and found a few scattered hangs. We were all really tired and annoyed that we had had to walk so long.
By the time we had set up our camp and gotten cleaned and changed, we were finally getting into our sleeping bags just before 10pm…way past our bedtime. We decided that we would get up an hour later than normal to make up for the late night.
The old Lady Hiker wrote a book about her triple crown journey which I am reading right now. She’s awesome.
The Old Lady Hiker we met is still working on her triple crown, so it must be someone different. Funny to think that there are two hikers with this trail name!