CT – Day 24

Daily Miles: 21
Total Miles: 434

For the past week, the trail has been a bit sloppy.  There are muddy and slippery sections from the rain and the fact that most of the trail doesn’t have drainage gutters.  There have also been swampy sections from the melting snow.  Today, things seemed to reach a new level of sloppiness on the trail.

We were bummed to hear the rain start up this morning before our alarms went off.  We waited in our hammocks an extra half hour before getting up, but figured we couldn’t put things off forever, since there was no guarantee that the rain would stop.  Luckily, as we were packing up, the rain seemed to stop.

We saw multiple tents still up when we reached the next water source.  It seemed everyone was getting a slow start due to the rain.  The walking today was really good (minus all the slipping and sliding on the muddy trail).  We had a long gradual climb to a pass and then mostly just ridge walking in the afternoon.

The sky stayed grey all day and it basically rained off and on all day.  Our feet and shoes were wet within a few minutes of getting dressed, so we figured we might as well just walk in the rain.  It was never a torrential downpour, instead it was just a steady rain.  We had a moment this morning where it looked like the clouds were breaking, so we decided to do laundry.  However, within the five minutes it took to wash out our laundry, the blue skies were gone and we didn’t see them again until we were setting up our hammocks at the end of the day.  Needless to say, our laundry is still wet.

Besides the folks we saw camping at the first water source, we only saw two bike packers and one other CT hiker during the day.  Once we were setting up camp, a group of six passed us, heading for the next water source (we are in the middle of a 15 mile dry stretch).  One of the CT hikers, Zoom, offered us a ride after the trail back to the Denver area.  That could work out great, and we’ll probably take her up on her offer.

We stopped for our dinner break and sat under the tarp while it rained.  It stopped as we were finishing up, but the sky looked really grey, so we decided to go only another mile.  Once we started putting our hammocks up, we started to get more blue skies.  Looks like we could have walked further, but we are happy to be out of our muddy and wet clothes.  We are hopeful that the skies will continue to clear tonight and that we will wake up to a beautiful day.