Date: May 10, 2017
Miles: 406.7 – 436.1
“Oh look, more nature.” ~ Allen
I have to be honest, not much happened today except a lot of walking. A LOT. Almost thirty miles of walking. Which is not that hard to do if you don’t really take any breaks and you eat snacks and drink water while you are walking and you don’t take many pictures and you don’t stop until it’s getting dark and you’re a little masochistic.
The other thing that happened today was that I learned that brownie powder and a little water mixed together in a ziplock bag tastes awesome.
So, all day we hiked from the Sulphur Springs campground to the North Fork Ranger Station, trying to avoid the noxious poison oak and poodle dog bush along the way. There was quite a bit of both in this stretch and they hid sometimes in the middle of innocuous plants on the edges of the trail so I kept a wary eye downward all day.
At times, the trail was so overgrown that I just had to plow ahead and hope that there was nothing in there that could bite, sting or burn me. I survived.
We arrived at the ranger station with a little bit of daylight left – enough to see the giant transmission line towers extending over the campsites, looking like alien sentinels in the fog that was rolling in. Even if we wouldn’t have been able to see them, the loud hissing and crackling of the electricity running through them would have given them away. I set up my tent, cleaned myself up a bit and fell asleep pretty fast despite the noise. Up to today, i hadn’t been sleeping very well at night…I guess the thirty miles did me in.
