Wednesday, July 10th

Wednesday, July 10th. Day 22

Today's miles = 19 Total CDT miles = 314.5

Welp, Im glad today's hike is over.

The alarm went off at 4:40. I got up at 7:05. I don't think I was hiking until close to 8:30. I felt so dehydrated from yesterday with having not drank enough water due to the waterless stretch. It took me a while today to catch up on water, only in time to have more waterless stretches today. All the water lately has been off trail. Today's water was almost half a mile down a steep dirt road. Then when I got there there was no water. I followed the dry stream down quite a bit more until I ran into water. There was no choice but to find water there. It was 14 miles until the next water and I knew I would have to camp before it. So I grabbed 5 liters of water, drank one, and trudged back up to the trail.

Today was another sunny day. I made it about half the day before I had to cover my legs. I have the craziest sock line and compression short liner where sunburned meets pasty white. Other than the sun today the only real issue (outside of my shortness of breath - perhaps allergies or asthma) was the horse flies. They were horrible! They were everywhere biting me through my clothes. I would smack one and it would not die. These horse flies had immortal superpowers. Baboon got quite annoyed by the flies. The only other time I've seen him that annoyed was climbing up Pitamakan Pass in the absurd wind when he threw his ice axe in anger. I felt like today if he had still had his ice axe he would have tried to use it on the horse flies.

The trail was mostly on dirt roads today. It was nice that there was something wide to walk on but that also meant that there was no real tree cover. There was also a lot of incline today. A LOT! There is no easy trail on the Divide. There is no easy day on the Divide. There is nothing easy about the Continental Divide. I was saying today that if the bastard child of the AT and the PCT were to acquire all the miserable attributes of each you could confidently name it the Continental Divide Trail.