Day 34

Day 33: 11 miles

Today was the first day I swallowed my pride and ended up stopping way earlier than I had hoped. I stopped around 5 after only covering 11 miles in 9 hours. The day was full of big climbs but I was just moving really slow. It was lightly raining most of the day and I was constantly postholing in ice and sliding around in slush. I had some serious cold WAF today. I stopped early cause I was just moving too slow and didn’t want to do another really late night of hiking and the rain was only getting heavier and would continue to do so. Tomorrow is supposed to be nice so hopefully I can get back in the swing of things. I really need some nice days to seriously melt the ice on the trail because today it was melting but it was just an extreme nuisance and very hampering on my speed.

I just need to remind myself that this is why I started so early, so I could take shorter days like this if I needed to. I certainly don’t want to get into a habit of it but I did give myself a decent amount of flex time.

Today was the first time in a while i could appreciate a landmark along the trail. I still can’t see anything though the fog but I was able to see the guillotine, a suspended rock between 2 bigger rocks. I felt like King Henry’s wife for a brief moment.

I kind of wished I would’ve taken a video of walking on the trail at times today but I had 3 layers of mittens on and it just wasn’t easy. But anyways at times it was basically like walking in a huge pile of crushed ice cubes because so much ice was melting and falling off of tree recently. Today one pretty large piece hit me in the head and I actually yelled ow instinctively in response. The trail was just massive piles of small ice pieces and under them is freezing cold water. Sun please come out and do your thing. I haven’t seen the sun in almost a week. At times like this it is hard to stay loyal to the good vibes only gang.

Song of the day: symphony-clean bandit