Day 62 (ODT 29)

Day 61 (ODT 29): 25 miles

I started the day with 6 liters of water. That should be plenty for 23 miles to the next source. I was wrong.

It was 93 degrees and the hiking was difficult. I knew nearly the whole day would be cross country, but it was tougher and slower than I expected. When I was down to 1 liter of water by 3 and realized I was much farther away from the next source then I wanted to be, I knew things were going to get interesting. I took a 2 hour break in the heat of the day. I didn’t really plan on it, but I found some shade and it was too hard to get up and moving again.

I drank the last of my water by 6, which wasn’t much. After walking through Painted Canyon, I began climbing up an unnamed drainage which was as if it was trying to kill me. I was dehydrated, stumbling everywhere, dizzy, and disoriented. And this canyon was filled with giant boulders which you had to climb up and around. It was extremely frustrating and was pushing me to my limits.

I had to turn on the “break glass in case of emergency playlist” which was a hard and heavy EDM playlist. No thoughts, no real lyrics, no people talking on podcasts. Just a constant beat with a singular mission: GO. It worked for a while, until I got to the spring of despair.

After I made it out of there, I arrived at South Sheephead Spring, which was labeled as an unreliable source and didn’t look promising. But I was so desperate I went to investigate. As I was approaching it, I sank up to my knees out of nowhere before I knew what was going on. It turned out to be a sinkhole of decomposing black cow shit and mud. I was covered up to the knee in this smelly, disgusting, mucky substance. The goop in the crease on the back of the knee was the worst. But the maggots crawling on my legs were a nice touch too

I kept going. I stumbled, crawled, and fell in a controlled manner 3 more miles to Rookie Canton Spring which was glorious flowing water. I was so thirsty I didn’t even filter it. I just drank it straight from the pipe. Desperate times.I got there at 11. By the time I drank, filled up water, and cleaned the cow shit off my legs the best I could, it was midnight. I wanted to camp nearby but the Moo Mafia was not gonna let that happen. They were defensive of their water source. They weren’t gonna fight me for it. But they were gonna moo nonstop until I got annoyed and left. As I hiked away, they only seemed to follow me. And as I got farther away, I would only seem to come across more cows. I didn’t want to set up camp with constant mooing nearby cause, even as tired as I was, I thought it wouldn’t be the best white noise. I probably hiked an extra 2 miles before I finally got far enough away that their moo’s weren’t too annoying. I went to bed 1:45am.

In the 3 miles between the spring of despair and the good one, I was so desperate that I opened every water bottle I had to suck just a few droplets of water out of each. I was not feeling good. Other than my mental fog and disorientation, my face was tingling and my throat felt like plastic.

Song of the day: say no to drugs-fomo