Day 13: Snow Lake and Beyond

Mileage: 24.7 miles (225.2-249.9)

It started raining pretty hard by about 11:30pm last night. I woke up immediately and started moving my stuff over. Natty, my hiking partner for the last few days, had a broken tent pole and therefore no way to stay out of the rain, so we had planned for him to come into my tent if it stormed that night. Of course, it did. I scooted over to the far end of the tent and we fit okay given that we are both north of 6'1". The only problem was that by morning me and my sleeping bag were pretty drenched from touching the tent wall all night (...any single wall tarp/tent gets condensation, especially with two bodies creating moisture and rain doesn't help).

When we woke up around 6:30 I let Natty get his stuff together as literally two people couldn't move at once without getting more soaked. Once he finished and got out of the tent, I started hearing hard thumps against the tent walls. It had started hailing. The hail alternated with freezing rain and snow for the next hour pretty much rendering our hands and feet into blocks of ice. On top of that, we still had a number of river crossings before Snow Lake which made things even colder. It's crazy that just a few days ago it was close to 90 degrees in the shade and I hadn't seen running water for 130 miles. That's the CDT for ya.

Luckily, the sun poked out from behind the puffy clouds once we reached Snow Lake and we were able to lay out some of our things to dry. They also had running water and trash cans there, which was a nice for an easy drink and to unload some extra weight. After a few miles of cross-country up a nice little canyon we popped out on a forest road, which we followed the rest of the day. The road was a good respite from all the stream crossings and we were able to make bigger miles because of it. I still have about 71 to Pie Town which I need to do in the next three days before I run out of food.

For the last four miles of the day there was a wicked strong headwind over a barren stretch of road which pummeled us into submission. By 6:45 we had all we could take and also had reached a stream for water. I helped Natty rig up his rain fly as an emergency shelter, which proved surprisingly difficult, mostly because of it's irregular shape. Finally, with something passable, we both headed to bed exhausted from another long day. I really hope I don't wake up to snow.