Day 225 (HDT 39)

Day 223 (HDT 39): 25 miles

It was a pretty rough night but it could’ve been worse. It rained all night and the wind didn’t die down. It was gusting all night. With the gusts, my tent would wild out a little bit, but I weighed down all the stakes with big ass rocks so that helped a lot. Still, when i would wake up with a big wind gust, I would instinctually spread out my arms and legs to hold down the outside of my tent. I don’t know if it actually helped, but it at least felt like it held my tent down better.

I ended up drinking over 1.5 liters of water throughout the night. Normally I don’t drink any, a few sips of anything, cause I don’t want to have to get out of my sleeping bag to piss in the middle of the night. But with there was so much sand blowing into my tent from the wind that I kept getting a dry and chalky throat. I also had some sand castles in my tent in the morning and everything was covered in sand.

It was tough packing up in the pouring rain in the morning, but we had to get moving. Water was flowing in Hack Canyon pretty well now, and it would only get stronger as it went downstream with more tributaries pouring in so I’m glad we weren’t down in Kanab Creek Canyon.

I rigged up my umbrella to my pack this morning which was a huge help. Even though I was still wet, it was a major mental victory to not feel the rain falling on my upper body and head constantly.

I hiked up Hack Canyon in the rain for probably 4-5 hours before the rain stopped. I was skeptical at first, but then the skies cleared and it was a nice and sunny day. This was huge.

If it didn’t stop raining, we wouldn’t have been able to dry out our gear and that would’ve been a real problem. Having all wet gear when it was going to be around 16 degrees for the coming night would have been a dangerous proposition. If that was the case, I was actually planning on calling a friend to get us out of the cold for the night.

But since the sun did come out, we could dry out our tents and gear so it wasn’t a problem. It was still cold, but not dangerous.
It was a chill second half of the day road walking on the wide open Arizona Strip. I got a campsite just on the east side of a tree for a little wind block. But thankfully the wind died down around sunset.

Saw a lot of cool and colorful birds today. I don’t know shit about birds, but they were cool

Song of the day: you and whose army-Radiohead