Thursday, August 1st

Thursday, August 1st. Day 44

Today's miles = 16.2. Total CDT miles =  635.4

I was motivated to wake up this morning for coffee, cinnamon rolls, and egg sandwiches. The coffee and rolls we got from the general store but the egg sandwiches we made on our camp stoves. We scrambled 12 eggs in Monkey's cook pot and put them between four potato hoagie rolls with "processed imitation American cheese flavored product". They were delicious!! I would eat them every day on trail if I had the time in the morning to cook all those eggs.

Thomas came to pick us up to take us back to the trail and gave us a history lesson of the city of Leadore in the process. We were on trail and hiking by 11 or so. Today was another primarily uphill day. We followed the fence marking Idaho from Montana. We were on the Idaho side. The trail today didn't have very many trees. It was mostly exposed dry grassy balds with lots of sagebrush everywhere. It mostly looked like the high desert. This meant that you could see where you were going for miles and miles ahead of time. As we were in this area we could see some clouds rolling in. There were two large fronts headed right toward each other. We made it to a section of trail that was tree covered and began to asses the situation. We knew we were about to hike out of the trees and back onto exposed ridges. We waited a while by the trees to see what the storm would do. After about 30 minutes Monkey and I both felt the threat had passed for where we were headed and began to hike again. With the clouds also came the cold and wind. It was freezing! I was bundled up in most of my clothes while making dinner at a spring. That's when it started to rain a little. We booked it to our camp spot tonight and found it to also be exposed. I saw a small patch of trees kind of far off to the left side of the trail so we walked down there to check it out. I really didn't want to be the tallest thing on the top of a grassy bald in the middle of a thunder and lightening storm so we camped among the trees but not under them.

While setting up camp it got even colder. I had all my clothes except for my rain gear on and was bundled up in my zero degree sleeping bag and I was so cold! Half way through the night I felt the tent wall and it was frozen. It got COLD. I'm looking forward to the sun tomorrow.