Day 145

Day 145 (pct 35): 21 miles

This terrain really isn’t that hard so I should be covering more miles but it’s a confluence of a few small factors that’s slowing me down.

The biggest is probably the lingering snow here. It’s not really bad but it’s just annoying, and it makes the trail hard to follow sometimes. So every once in a while I’ll just end up on the side of a mountain far off trail and have to backtrack. It’s also been pretty warm so there is some postholing which is annoying. And when not on snow, the past few days have been mostly just trying to avoid water on and all around the trail sometimes having to do a big loop around to stay a little dry.

The second are the stream crossings. There were probably around 7 serious steam crossings today. I only had to Ford 2 of them (which were wide and coollldddd water) but no matter what they usually slow me down. I’ll spend a decent amount of time trying to find any way to cross without having to get my feet wet. There were a lot of logs today, some a bit sketchy, but they saved me from getting wet. The 2 times I did Ford takes some time to get across and dry off. But the worst one was toward the end of the day. There was this pretty big stream and I didn’t want to Ford it so I found a log to cross one part of it. But then it turned out there were a bunch of channels and islands around here so I ended up wasting over 30 minutes crossing logs onto a different piece of land before I got to where the trail actually was. It was such a waste of time I wish I would’ve just forded.

And to make matters worse, that event was in the pit of a valley so it was mosquito hell. Along with rain, mosquitoes are something that put me on edge and raise my irritability level so anything can make me angry. I really wasn’t expecting mosquitoes to be a problem this early on but I’ve probably killed over a hundred in the last 3 days, mostly today. Probably gonna have to bring out the deet soon.

In the desert I never thought I’d say this but there’s just too much water here. It holds pockets of cold air and is a festival for mosquitoes. Just a little less water plz

Song of the day: Brutal-Olivia Rodrigo