Slept about as expected, which is to say, poorly. I was dragging so much to start the day that a little after 10am I decided I needed to pull off and nap. I dozed for about an hour and a half until I felt normal, at which point I knew I had a lot of hiking ahead of me and not as many hours as I would like in which to do it – especially in the heat of the day.
The rest of the day was a blur, albeit a moderately painful one for my feet given the extra food weight in my pack. I think even for 150 miles I packed too much food. I’m trying to eat a lot of it up so that I don’t have to carry it as far – ha! It doesn’t help that there are some big water carries in this section. Today I finished off the last 14 miles of a 16 mile carry, and will be doing a one mile each way detour in 10 miles to avoid doing a full 20 mile carry.
Also looking ahead at where water sources are, I’m aiming to do back to back 22 mile days. Given I struggled through 18.5 today, I’m gonna have to be at the top of my game. It’s 8:30 now, and still decently light out, but I’m heading to sleep. Took a full dose of 600mg of ibuprofen hoping to glide off into dreams of plentiful streams and light packloads.
Oh – and I realized I lost my first item today, my tent stakes! They’re not in my tent bag which I repacked so weirdly after cowboy camping. I expect they flopped out last night when I got to camp as it was getting pretty dark, and I didn’t look around closely enough to see them this morning. I feel extra foolish since I noticed two different kinds of tent stakes that weren’t mine that other campers had left behind – so much for listening to that nudge that my guardian angel was giving me. Fortunately I haven’t been using them for the last couple weeks, and can make do with rocks if I need to. I also sent half of them home earlier, so I’ll just put those in a brighter bag and make sure I keep track of them once I get them in a resupply!
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