Miles Hiked: 21.5
Total Milage: 1680.1
I didn’t sleep at all last night. Even after hiking 30 miles I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes and relax. I got out of my tent around 5:30am. We had a short day ahead of us but I still wanted to get a relatively early start just in case it rains later. The terrain today was a lot of gently rolling hills through meadows and lots of very dense forests. There were quite a few areas of completely burned trees as well. All day I was so paranoid about grizzly bears. It felt like one could be hiding anywhere. 12 pack and I took lots and lots of breaks. The miles were going very fast and we didn’t want to get to camp too early.
The only other people we saw today were two weekend hikers going the opposite direction. Around 3pm we realized we had already hiked almost 20 miles. We stopped to make dinner and planned on staying there for a long time. We didn’t want to get to camp too early and be hungry after putting our food away. For dinner I made some ramen noodles and a carnation breakfast drink. As we were making dinner it looked like a storm was rolling in. Luckily we were so close to camp that we only had to hike 1.5 more miles before pitching a tent. We ended up packing up dinner earlier than planned just to get our tents up before it started to rain on us. As we were pitching our tents in a small grove of pine trees it started to hail and thunder boomed. I was happy to be done hiking.
As we got closer to camp today, I saw quite a few piles of bear poop. It was a little alarming and definitely made me nervous about our camp spot. Luckily there was a metal bear box to store our stuff in so I put almost everything I had except the stuff I needed to sleep in it just to be safe. It was only 5pm but I was extremely tired all of a sudden. I closed my eyes around 6pm and slept very well until almost the morning. The only thing that interrupted my sleep were some cows that were mooing like crazy. It sounded like there were 200 cows and it lasted almost two hours. I wondered if they were being chased by a bear or wolf.
Happy Trails!
-Early Bird
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