Sunday, August 4th

Sunday, August 4th. Day 47

Today's miles = 18.1 Total CDT miles = 692.2

I was exhausted this morning. I grunted, wined, and almost kicked to stay in my sleeping bag but Monkey managed to talk me out of it and reminded me that morning equals coffee. I begrudgingly got up. We were not hiking until 8:40am. The morning was slow moving for me and all uphill. I had to stop a lot today to eat because I really skimped on dinner last night. I wasn't feeling too well last night and had a hard time getting down my cheesy mashed potatoes. Baboon ended up having to eat most of them.

Today's hike just seemed really difficult. No matter how hard I pushed I couldn't go any faster than I was. There was a cool part about today though. About 5 or 6 miles in we came across a vertical cave. Naturally we climbed into it. About 15 feet down was the cave floor completely covered in bones! The bones were most likely from bison and there were tons of them. You couldn't walk on the ground without completely disturbing this grave site and stepping all over the bones. We hung out here for a while before realizing that it was getting late and we hadn't really put in any miles. So, we hiked on. Shortly after we ran into a group of three NoBos. One of which we had met last year on the PCT. Baboon and I stopped for a while to talk to the three guys and get some water information from them about the trail ahead.

I didn't eat lunch today until after 4pm. I took lunch at the first water source for the day. It was a pretty decent spring so I didn't treat the water. I hiked until after 9 and didn't get to where I wanted to be. I would have kept hiking but the trail was back to being cross country (no trail) and Monkey and I knew it would have been too difficult to try to navigate in the dark and there was a storm rolling in. So, we bunkered down in some pines on a horrible slant. It didn't ended up raining that badly and we both had to sleep at horrible slants. Ah well. I guess you can't have a flat camp spot every night.