SUMMARY:  Today was like a rock-walking and climbing tour…all kinds of rocks, colors, formations, and mind-blowing scenery.  It did involve a couple of scary places (for me) where all that kept me going was the thought, “If I can handle the scary stuff on Mt. Whitney, I can handle this.”  In the afternoon, an extraordinary chain of events happened. A guy named Slapshot passed us and 1) learned our trail names and 2)  That we were headed for the water cache 5 miles away.  We got to the roadcrossing where the cache was supposed to be, and could find no sign of it, so we flagged down a passing car and got water.  But Slapshot had found the cache AND a note inside for US to “Call your daughter Mercy ASAP.”  So as we went cruising by the cache, not planning to stop because we’d gotten water already, he flagged us down–“Hey, Fixit and 3rd Monty–there’s a note for you!”  Without him, we would never have seen the note.  It was bad news.  Our other daughter’s husband has suddenly died.  Oh no!  The rest of the day I was hiking all choked up.

DETAILS: Scenery-wise, today was a mindblowingly amazing day.  I would not have missed it for anything!  But it was also a very tough day, hikingwise–“embrace the brutality” definitely applied.

The day began with packing up at 5:20, then heading for a spring not too far ahead.  When we got there, we discovered HoB camped on a little hill nearby.  He came down and joined us, and together we looked at how to get at the water. HoB said when he arrived at the spring last night, it was too dark to see anything, so now we were all studying what to do.  Turned out that it works like this: the water is down in the ground, in a sort of tank, with large flat pieces of stone laid over the top to keep critters from falling in.  First you move a stone out of the way, then you lie down on your stomach and reach down to get at the water.  We had a look at the first bottlefull–it appeared to be OK, but we decided to AquaMira it, just in case.

We walked on with HoB until we stopped at 7:00 for breakfast.  Fixit is not feeling well, and he was not hiking at his usual speed.  He said that the problem is that for the last 2 nights, when he lies down, he starts to have trouble breathing.  He sort of solved the problem by propping himself up with his pack, but still didn’t sleep well and now he is feeling very tired.  Every hill leaves him out of breath, and he was hiking at a snail’s pace, often stopping to lie down.   I was very worried about him.

But the scenery offered lots of chances to stop and rest and LOOK at the amazing rock formations.  First we made our way down to the bottom of the wide valley, and crossed the totally dry riverbed, which was covered with some sort of fine white substance that looked like salt.  I didn’t taste it to find out, though.  Probably it’s actually some sort of alkali.  Then came the climb out of the valley, where there was one amazing rock formation after another, all different shapes and colors.  Finally we reached a fence by some big rocks, where there was a “hiker gate” for us to get through.   Waiting for us there were 3 horses, who obviously figured “We know the drill on how to yogi stuff from hikers.”  One of them, the brown one, was obviously the boss and was trying to get the other two to cooperate.  No luck, though!   We just don’t have enough food on us to be sharing any of it with the horses.  Poor things–they looked disappointed when we just elbowed past them and kept going.

Fixit was having such a hard time with uphills that I realized we would never make it to Cuba right after lunch tomorrow as planned.  I hope we make it there at least before dark, anyway!  To add to the difficulty, it turned into a very hot day.  We started hiking under umbrellas.

Little did we know, though, we were walking right into a God-engineered chain of events.  It went like this:

1.  Because Fixit was so slow, in the afternoon another CDT hiker named Slapshot caught up with us.  We stopped to talk, and he learned our trail names–“Fixit” and “3rd Monty.”  We told him we were headed for the water cache 5 miles away, so he said, “See you at the cache” and took off.
2. When we reached the paved road where the water cache was supposed to be, we hunted everywhere and could not find it.  We were desperately low on water.
3. So I resorted to trying to flag down passing cars to ask for water, and hooray, a guy named Smokey stopped.  He was thrilled to be able to help CDT hikers, and gave us all the water we needed.  He even gave us some bananas and trail snax, which we ate immediately!   We are hungry!
4. We hiked on, and only a couple of minutes later, there was the cache, hidden in some bushes.  Slapshot was there, too, and looking serious.  “There’s a note here for you guys,” he said, and held out a little yellow piece of paper.  It said “Fixit and 3rd Monty–call your daughter Mercy ASAP.  Urgent.”  This did not sound good.  But could we get cell phone service out in the middle of nowhere?  Slapshot offered to help if needed, but we did get our cell phone to work, were able to call our daughter, and she told us that our other daughter’s husband had just died.  Oh no! With our cell phone battery very low, we decided we’d better wait till Cuba (tomorrow) to call our other daughter.

If Fixit had not been slow, we would never have met Slapshot, and we would have walked right by the water cache without even looking in.  We would never have seen the note.  But Slapshot knew our trail names and he flagged us down.  So even though we were horribly bummed about what had happened (it was not a total shock; our daughter’s husband had been battling cancer for some time) we were still heartened by the way God took care of the situation for us.

The rest of the afternoon we hiked as quickly as we could, trying to chew into the 33 more miles to Cuba.  But we were slowed down by some (for me) scary steep, rocky uphills climbing up the mesa, and then once we were on top of that mesa, the trail went right by the edge of a huge dropoff.  I don’t like heights, and walking on a somewhat slippery, rocky trail right by a big edge was rough.  I had to force myself to keep going, when what I felt like was “Aaaaaaa!  I can’t do this!”   Near the end of the day, we had a very skimpy dinner.  We’re rationing our food now, hoping to have enough to make Cuba tomorrow.  But we did find a nice place to cowboy camp out of the wind among the rocks, and spent time praying for our daughter and her 3 children.