Thursday, August 29th

Thursday, August 29th. Day 72

Today's miles = 20. Total CDT miles = 1083.7

This morning I woke up at Clear Lake. We got hiking around 8am or so. The hike from Clear Lake to Deep Lake was a giant rock sheet that went up for a mile or so. It wasn't the best way to start a morning but the views were amazing. After all the climbing from yesterday I was kind of0 hoping today would have been a bit mellow but Temple Pass was a horrible climb. We climbed up from a lake to another lake. Then we climbed from that lake to another lake. From that lake to Temple Pass which was a rock scree straight up the mountain. We had to cross a boulder field to get to the trail and once we did the trail was steep and full of loose rock. The last 3/10th of a mile up the pass was more boulder fields and the climb down was just as steep. It was 11am by the time I got down and I had only done 5 miles for the day. Luckily after Temple Pass the trail did mellow a little bit and I walked through a valley for the afternoon. I took lunch at a little lake around 1:30. I still wanted to get in 20 miles despite how slow moving the morning was, so after lunch I started to huff it a little to catch up on some ground. There were a lot of cows and a lot of cow shit infested water sources at the second half of the day but I try not to think about it when I'm drinking it.

We got to a car trail which marked about 19 miles from the road to town. 3 miles into the car trail I came across a campground (if you want to call it that) that had a privy and a trash can. It was a free campground of about 10 sites. There were a few families there for Labor Day weekend so I talked to them for a while and learned that Panama and Beth took a longer route over a mountain that would lead them to the road to town. Baboon and I on the other hand decided to continue on the car trail to the road.

We had dinner at the campground then night hiked to another campground just like it (but more remote looking) 3 miles farther. We set up next to a privy which we stored our food bags in because we didn't want to hang. Looking forward to town tomorrow.