It’s amazing how a day can change from a bad one to a good one, and today was one of those. It rained last night, so we woke up with a wet rainfly to pack up. It was a hot, humid, and hazy morning, and the trail was just full of ups and downs that were made all the more annoying due to being wet and slick. There was no comfort when the day started, not even a nice light breeze. It was just hot and sticky, and we (well mostly me) were annoyed.
We stopped for a bit after about 3 hours of hiking and had a little snack, and there was a spigot in a parking lot with potable water that we could refill at. That was nice not having to filter water. A few miles later, we hiked an extra quarter mile off trail to go to Canopus Lake beach. That was the turning point for the day. Even though it was humid, we jumped in the lake to cool off. We were joined by several other thru-hikers, Barnum, Scorpion, and Shepard. We were able to grab a bit of food and cold drinks from the concession stand, and the sun even came out so we could dry out our rainfly.
A line of thunderstorms started to threaten the area, so we hung out for a bit under cover, but the rain never really came. With under 5 miles to go for the day we decided to chance the seemingly impending rain and headed out quickly. Scorpion and Bear Bell set a brisk pace for us, and we covered that 4.7 miles in just under 1.5 hours, and never had a drop off rain. Of course it was still quite humid, so our clothes were soaked with sweat anyway.
We’re tented out at the RPH (Ralph’s Peaks Hiker) shelter for the night. This is a nice spot, made even better because we were able to get pizza delivered to the shelter. It was nice to crawl into the tent with a full belly tonight.
So the day ended up being a good one. We covered just under 19 miles total, but had some great stops along the way that lifted us out of the funk that the morning brought us. We’ve got a much shorter day tomorrow, just over 12 miles and then we’ll be taking two zero days. We should be back on the trail by Monday.
