Day 115: Frolicking in an Oven
August 3, 2017
Mile 1658.03 Campsite to Mile 1676.73 Campsite
Not every day is fun out here. I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now. Today just sucked. It was hot, there were several climbs, we were tired. We’ve really been needing to get back on our older schedule of starting early (wake up at 5:00) and camp by evening instead of this hike into the night thing. It’s a crap cycle because you hike into the night meaning that you need to sleep in to get enough rest so therefore you hike into the night again and so on and so forth. It really sucks hiking like that. You have no time to wind down before bed, no time to write blogs like this, just set up the tent and go to bed.
We wanted to change that cycle today so after going to bed at 11:00 we woke up at 5:00 groggily and weary. As if that wasn’t hard enough, a the rest of the climb awaited us including its steepest section. The trail leveled off for a bit before descending to where we had lunch and then climbing up the same height after lunch. Meanwhile, the temperature rose and rose. I have no clue what it got up to, but locals were saying yesterday that today was going to be even hotter. It’s cooler up here at 5000+ feet, but still so ridiculously hot. The air is filled with smoke from recent wildfires in the surrounding areas exacerbating the heat situation.
Around mid afternoon I really started to get grumpy and bonk. Eating and hydrating will only get you so far in this heat. I just wanted to sleep in the worst way, but Glowworm was insistent that we keep pressing on (which I am thankful for, by the way). But just as we began hiking again and as I was starting to feel better again, the heat really got to Glowworm and the tides had changed. We stopped at the next water source and just wound up passing out at a nearby campsite for an hour or so. If we wanted to do the planned 25 miles then we’d have to hike late again. This trail has a way of proving to you how pitiful we can be and completely demoralizing you.
We opted to just cut the day short and hike an additional three miles instead of the planned nine. At least we got to camp around 7:30 and was able to take our time eating and settling down. As you can tell this is the most I’ve written in several days so I’ve had the time to do this as well. I hope we can continue finishing earlier except actually hit our mileage targets.
