Jul 10 – Nelson Creek

Good sleep in Sierra City last night in the backyard of the restaurant. There was a stream right there which gave some decent white noise. Was awoke to the sounds of construction vehicles working on the road.

Walked the mile and a half from town back to the trailhead and began a healthy ascent up to the mountains overlooking Sierra City at 8:30. The grade was excellent for the climb, which made it seem not as steep. We had a lot of ridge walking for the first part of the day. It wad filled with great views all over.

We didn’t move too fast for most of the day until we realized we were best off hiking 28 trail miles to get to a spot where we could actually camp…so we stepped it up a bit. While we were hiking we ran into Big Wuss, Kitchen sink, Mangina, Cool Ranch, Capitan, and Moss.

Once we were getting fairly close to where we thought we would camp, Qball and I slowed down and were walking and talking when I stepped on a big piece of Ponderosa Pine from a blow down and rolled my ankle really hard. This was the same ankle that I sprained last year on the AT. I had been wearing a heavy duty ankle brace for all of the trail, until two days ago, when I switched to just wearing it for half days (I was starting to get blisters on the side of my heal because I had just got a new brace sent out last week and it needs to be broken in). It hurt a lot when I twisted it and had all my weight on it. I think having hiking poles helped me from completely falling onto the ankle and going down….but it still hurt a ton. I immediately got the brace on that leg and tightened my shoes down to keep compression on it. I was able to walk decently till we found a camp spot..it has a throbbing achey kind of pain but doesn’t feel like the sharper pain I felt last year when a step
didn’t land perfectly. We camped next to a stream so I was able to soak it in pretty cold water and get a closer look at it. It is swollen a good bit. Will see how it is in the morning.

Daily Distance: 29
Trip Distance: 1,208.6