Mile 2400 to 2420
The mountains seem to be very adept at turning a sixty percent chance of light rain into a one hundred percent chance of being cold and wet. The rain started only minutes after we zipped up our tents the previous night and was still going strong when we woke up.
I ate granola in bed, a first on the trail, and stayed nice and cozy in my sleeping bag. After some yelling and groaning back and forth over the pitter patter of the rain, we packed away our warm sleeping bags and clambered out into the gray.
[rainy waterfall!; jungle lookin; post rain cheese; the mountains; the mountains with some trees; who do we have here!?]
Have I mentioned that hiking in rain isn’t so great? I do my best to keep spirits high, and today I did a better job of staying dry after a modification to my rain skirt, but that’s about as good as it gets. The views were mainly of fog, but they were spectacular in themselves. You could see bright white fog mixing with dark, mysterious fog. It was swirling and rising out of a heavy tree forest below. It slid in through a break in the canyon and shot upward over a lake.
We hiked, without stopping more than a minute to rearrange our rain jackets, until 3 when the rain finally let up. A duel between dark clouds and blue sky took place over our heads and we cheered the battle.
Our treat for the day came when we made it to camp. I hollered to Hawkeye who was a smidge ahead to make sure he knew we were stopping, and then came “boom boom!?”. “ANIMAAALLLLLLLLL!!!”. Let the games begin. We had run across our good friend Animal Style who has been nursing some tendinitis in his shin. He spent the entire day inside his tent due to the rain; we certainly couldn’t blame him. We caught up while setting up our tents and cooking dinner, giving him a little extra food that we were carrying since he has taken a bit longer to do this section than he expected. It was really nice to see such a good friend out here, but tomorrow we will hike on and separate again.
