Thursday, March 18
16 miles?
Absolutely trash day. Woke up freezing cold covered in so much condensation and frost. Could not will myself to get up so laid there until after the sun came up which meant we didn’t start hiking until after 830 am, an ungodly late start.
I don’t even remember or care about the first few miles. We made it to Fable Valley and got in a little sparsely cairned trail that took us down into the valley. We took a long lunch to dry out stuff and that again cost us some time. It put me in a shitty mood knowing that we weren’t going to hike as many miles as we had yesterday. We are still a few days ahead of schedule but I was really hoping to make it to Hite tomorrow and it doesn’t seem like that’ll happen now.
The valley was cool from above but once we got in it, it kinda sucked. We mostly hiked through washes, eventually hiking high pour offs we had to scramble around usually. We hit a little snow which made the scrambles a little more interesting but nothing too hard. My shitty mood was slightly improved when we had to scale up a fun class 3 ish chimney but it quickly diminished when we had to go back to bushwhacking through overgrown washes. At some point I lost the cap off one of my bottles and a chunk of my thinlight I keep strapped to the top of my pack was ripped off.
We finally got out of the valley and I just kinda lost it and stormed off from Jordan. Because I hike faster than him and because I’m more neurotic than him, I tend to be the one who does most of the route finding and navigating. Today I just didn’t feel like doing it and tried to get him to lead the way. He kept taking his time and stopping and it pissed me off how slow it was so near the top of the climb out, I just lost it. My little tantrum took me off the route and I had to cute across a field to get back on. Jordan lost me and couldn’t find me so he tried to message Kay for my Garmin number which thankfully didn’t go through.
I waited for him at a Junction (like I always do) and he caught up. Waiting for him for a while worried me and actually fixed my mood a little. But that also went away when we had to go back into a shitty overgrown horse pasture drainage.
We almost stopped there but it was still early enough to go a few more miles. We dropped down into Youngs Canyon using a fairly well marked light trail. The canyon was cool though we didn’t spend much time in it. There’s supposed to be a huge impassable pour off but I think we skirted around it early and didn’t see it.
We climbed out of the canyon scrambling our way. The way up wasn’t clear, even with GPS tracks, so we just had to pick and choose the best ways up which often probably weren’t the best ways. There were some spicy light climbing moves but nothing overly hard.
We made it up the plataue and overview of the canyon and decided to stop here instead of trying to descend back down in the dark. Unfortunately this area is covered in crypto soil which made finding spots big enough for our tents a pain. Some dark clouds rolled in and we started to feel rain drops so it might rain yet again tonight.
Bad day today but tomorrow should be better.
Plants Outside 