Captain's Log: Day 71

June 22, 2016

My body had me up at 6:00am despite my intention of sleeping in a bit. I let Rickets sleep in some more and caught up on work-related emails for half an hour. We headed next door to the coffee shop for a light breakfast before making our way to the Best Western where Piper's Mom was already giving some a hikers a ride from. Two of guys were headed north and the other was section hiking south. As has become routine, we traded trail conditions with the nobos on the short drive to the trailhead.

We climbed the entire morning back up to the ridge. Early on I realized that my pocket knife had slipped from my pocket I the parking lot. I texted Piper's Mom on the off chance that she might find it on a future shuttle run. She not only offered to go take a look for later in the day when she went into town but also to mail on to the next town (instead of just passing it on to another sobo to hopefully make its way to me as had been my suggestion). Again, I continue to be amazed by the trail community both on and off the trail itself.

Rickets and I had a long talk about life to pass the long hours climbing. This was interrupted a few times as we ran into other groups, all headed north. One was composed of a few section hikers and true flip-floppers (doing each half of the trail starting from the midpoint to its respective border) and we saw them at the midpoint monument. We passed the Swiss group with a muzzled German Shepard that we had heard about. It didn't seem too aggressive when we passed but the muzzle was nonetheless intimidating. It also has to be terrible for the dog trying to pant to cool itself down in the heat with that thing on. At our midday water break we stopped at a spring with two young women, one of whom had hiked on the CDT with my friend Guy on a Buffalo (whom I had met on the AT) so that was a cool connection.

There was a slight miscalculation about distance to the next spring and camping and it ended up being a longer afternoon than planned. We had the pleasant surprise of running into Strider and Oats, the two men from the UK we had last seen in Kennedy Meadows. We caught up with them for a bit. Oats was now sporting a Hawaiian shirt and quite the beard. Strider's had come in nicely as well but he was keeping it a bit more groomed. We said goodbye and finished up the day with a nice forested campsite and tasty spring water.