Day 319

Day 319 (AZT 24): 37 miles

I got a full 8 hours of sleep last night but it still wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to get up in the morning but some lil Wayne got me up and going. In the afternoon I sat down on the trail for a a short break in the shade and ended up falling asleep for over an hour. I think I’m ready to be done with this trail and rest up a bit.

That being said, today was one of my favorite days on trail scenery-wise. It wasn’t anything crazy but I felt like I was in a Cormac McCarthy novel most of the day, although more All The Pretty Horses than No Country cause I didn’t have evil incarnate hunting me down. The vast landscape of tall yellow grass was beautiful, along with the amazing sky. It just felt like a good ole western. There was also much more green then I was expecting this far south.

I took a wrong turn on a keep track that wasn’t maintained at all and there were some brutal plants along it. There were little plants that didn’t look too bad but dig into my skin and were barbed so they were a real pin to get out. Just seeing your skin stretch outward in an unnatural way while pulling it out is sickening.

While hiking around 11pm I nearly had a heart attack. I was just walking along when all of a sudden a bright light flashed to my side. A million thoughts went through my head in a second: everything from somebody is flashing an old Polaroid camera at me to somebody has Rick Dalton’s flamethrower pointed at me. It was a lot of thinking for a millisecond but it turned out to be just a trail cam.

After hiking until around midnight I finally reached the top of the climb up to the ridge of Miller Peak. There was supposed to be camping up there but I couldn’t find anything so I ended up having to do an extra mile before I found anything decent, which was a really slanted spot in a pile of pine needles.

Listened to the first quarter of the buckeyes game today but they were scoring so quickly the radio kept cutting out and I missed it. Good problem to have

AZT Penultimate

Song of the day: sabotage-beastie boys