As of around 10:50 AM yesterday morning, the three of us have been hiking for one week.  Though a week seems like an arbitrary amount of time to celebrate, I still feel accomplished for sticking through the seven days and roughly 150 miles.  So far it's been a fun and great experience, hiking all day, seeing awesome canyons and sunsets, and watching the moon set at 5 AM on early morning hikes.

But the seventh day of hiking was not fun for me.  Everyone has those days when they wake up and everything, including the things that were fun the previous day, just feel awful and annoying.  In my own trail experience, that day was the 19th.

It really is a hard thing to just hike all day, especially when you can't get your mind off the repetition of it all. The heat (even though it's not even close to hot yet) drains the mind, and the dryness of the desert can be frustrating to say the least.  Even though we took a four hour break and had burgers during that time, I couldn't rid myself of the feeling of doubt.   What are we doing after all? I'm enjoying the hike, but what happens when it ends? Will we even finish the hike? What happens when I have to tell others that I tried to finish the trail but couldn't. Isn't that not a complete hike? Does that make me incompetent? What is important on this trip?

We arrived at camp around 6:30 PM, about 2 miles short of where we wanted to stop.  Kawecki and Chrobot started cooking dinner, but all I felt I could do was lay out my blue pad, sit, and watch the sky.

I thought about those questions for a while, just lying there listening to music.  It would be wrong to say that I reached any sort of conclusion, as I don't think I found any real or meaningful answers to those questions. But I think that's the right place to be, at least for now. All I'm going to do is try to appreciate each step I take, and I might just end up enjoying the footfall. And at the very least, it won't be as annoying.