Today was a VERY good day and also a very bad day. On the good side, my hip pain is totally gone! I can now walk freely without limping. And my ability to hike on rough, rocky trail is really improving. It was rocks on trail almost all day, and I still managed 26 miles. Wow!  Another wonderful plus was that much of the time today we were up above timberline, with fabulous views that extended for miles. 

The downside, well, that began late in the afternoon. All day, I’d been  been dealing with what I think is a digestive problem involving sort of stomach cramps and pain– no fun– and suddenly I had a slight “accident” which resulted in having to shed my pack and go offtrail to clean up my underwear.  Frustration!  I so badly wanted to make as many miles as possible, and the cleanup job took awhile.  Then after supper, we started to hike on, and I had only gone a few steps when I stubbed my toe on a rock and fell very hard onto some other rocks. Thank God, I was not seriously hurt, but badly scraped, bruised and gashed.  My left knee had a gash in it that should have had stitches, but we were miles from any help, and of course my poor pant leg got all torn and bloody.  My left arm and hand are all scraped and bruised, as well as my ribs.  The side of my face hit a rock, too, and  my glasses were bent but they did not break.

Bill had to be very patient while I sat by the trail and cried, partly from pain and discouragement, and partly thanking God very fervently that all I had was a collection of bad “owies” but nothing truly serious. Meanwhile overhead, the clouds had moved in and thunder was rumbling and echoing off the mountains. I finally pulled myself together and limped off along the trail again. 

Well, that was pretty bad, but it didn’t happen till the end of the day (probably because I was tired).  The majority of today was wonderful.  We were leapfrogging with several other hikers, and tended to catch up/meet up with them at water sources or at shady places.  We saw Shin again–he looked really good, and was hiking fast, though he said he took a zero yesterday because he was so tired.  And best of all, we met our first REAL SOBO’s!  They weren’t just flipfloppers–they’d hiked all the way down from Canada!  They were a French couple, and very sweet.  We also met a lot of flipflopper SOBO’s–some had come down from Ashland, and some from Trout Lake, WA.  Another couple we met were taking photos of the hikers.

Water is always an issue on this part of the PCT–we have to be very careful and very aware of our water use and where the “next water” is.  We even had to cross a pretty large snowfield–the first in quite a few days.  As I said, the trail is quite rocky most of the time–either lava rocks or granitic rocks, but it has a comfortable mix of flat sections, uphills and downhills.  Down below us in the valleys were many pretty lakes, and we could see there were campers next to them.  The wildflowers were very nice, and yahoo!   We spotted our first beargrass!  That’s always worth a cheer–you KNOW you are getting closer to Oregon when you start spotting beargrass! 

When we stopped to camp for the night (we found a very nice campsite!), the thunder was rumbling, but we never saw any lightning.  We put up the net tent under our tarp, because the mosquitoes were definitely a presence, and I was so sore from all my “owies” that I needed to be able to lie down and sleep in peace.   I thought about all the things that had happened today.  I tend to “debrief” myself and ask, “What can I learn from this?  What could I do to solve____ problem?”  I decided that for the stomach problems, one thing I could do was eat more slowly.  I’ve been sort of gobbling food down so as to get back on the trail ASAP.  And when we get to Etna, I’m going to find some chewable digestive enzymes and see if that helps.  I also decided that maybe I’m having trouble with uphills because I’m so terribly thin and way behind on calories.  I asked some of the other hikers what they do to stay ahead of calorie deficit, and the top two answers were “Nutella” and “Peanut butter.”  So I’ll look for those in Etna, too.

Walk with Aragorn to Isengard: See distant smoke from Isengard