Thursday, March 25
16 miles.
Not much better today. On and off shitty mood all day.
First few miles were finishing the descent off Tarantula Mesa then onto the “below Tarantula Mesa” alternate to the first spring of the day. The spring was totally choked out with reeds and cattails and we had a serious buchwhack to get to the water, a small pool fed from the unseen spring. Lots of white crust around the water but didn’t taste alkaline.
Took the second below Tarantula alt through some exposed coal sections and made out way to Swap Canyon, another neat little canyon. Had lunch at the first of two springs there and then followed the canyon out to Capital Reef National Park, our third official national park on this hike.
We hiked on dirt roads for a bit up the Burr Trail switchbacks, a long series of not that steep switchbacks up to the Lower Muley Twist Trailhead and our next cache.
We dug up our cache and extra canned fruit, coconut water, and maps. We got through the first section of this leg faster than planned and as a result had a lot of extra food. We tried to each as much of it as we could so avoid carrying it the next section. Our cache had 5 days of food but we decided to take the Halls Creek alternate which shaves off 12 or so miles from the route. And since we’re hiking more miles than planned, we should actually be done in 3 and half days, maybe 4. Either way, we’re probably carrying too much food for this section.
We stuffed our faces and packed up all our trash in our empty bucket. We sat by the road for a while trying to find someone to gift our bucket to. One van did pass by and I pathetically waved to them instead of flagging them down. Social anxiety got to me. While we were waiting, it started to lightly snow on us. The wind had been blowing on us again as we got our food and it had been overcast all day. Just once we’d like to have a resupply where the weather doesn’t shit all over us.
After an hour, another car passed by and Jordan was able to get them to stop and take our bucket and trash. Thankfully we won’t have to come back for this one. We did see another open cache bucket with a bunch of trash I hope someone is coming back for.
I started feeling bad again, both physically because of all the food we had to eat, and mentally because of the snowy wait for someone to pick up our bucket and because of the whole depression thing.
After we got rid of the bucket, we started hiking down the Lower Muley Twist Canyon, a long beautiful winding canyon with sheer redstone walls, soft huecos, little alcoves, and a few caves. We didn’t get far down before the rain started up and we set up in a little semi protected side canyon.
We ate even more food for dinner and I feel pretty nauseous now. This is the first time I have ever been too full in a thru hike. I can’t believe we have too much food and I don’t want to eat any more of it.
Tomorrow’s my birthday. Hopefully my stomach and head feels better by then.
Plants Outside 