06/30
Waking up to a sunrise choir of bird calls never gets old. Today’s 14.5-mile hike promised to be rather interesting as we would pass the “Priest Shelter”. Trail tradition is to write your confessions in the shelter’s logbook. This, of course, makes for some amusing on-trail entertainment. The path there, however, was a steep climb… not anything different than what we’ve encountered before, but also not something I’ve grown very fond of. About a mile out from the shelter, the storm clouds began rolling in. Thunder echoed in the distance, and I preemptively grabbed my poncho before making my ascent. Luckily, I made it to the shelter just before the first drop fell. Nick and I sat inside while the storm ran its course and read the hiker confessions. Some were trivial, not storing food properly or stealing toilet paper from hostels. Others were more… unsavory. There was one confession in particular that had me fuming. “Cuppa,” a hiker you may remember me mentioning a few weeks back, confessed that he convinced his trail group to hit a vape he found on the ground, thus giving them all norovirus! Coincidentally, we saw Cuppa just a day before we both contracted the illness… I knew something was off about him and am sure that’s who we got it from. Let that just be a lesson: never trust a Brit.
As the storm passed, we continued up the trail while the emerging sun turned the cool rain into a humid hellscape. Our feet were begging the rocks to breathe us mercy, and at one point, I was so hot, I started seeing stars. I had to sit down in the middle of the trail and try everything I could to cool off. Fanning myself with a hat, pouring what little water I had over my head, and ultimately just sitting still for 30 minutes. Eventually, I mustered the strength to make it the last two miles to camp. A stale, isolated shelter nestled by a creek. The air was stagnant, and any hope of a gentle breeze was a pipe dream. I washed myself in the icy stream, made some buffalo macaroni and cheese, rolled out my sleeping pad, and went to bed.