SUMMARY:  There must have been a huge forest fire here a few years ago—we spent most of today in burn zones. Some were messy, with lots of rocks and broken branch bits on the trail. Some were growing a crop of baby trees. And some had turned into “the blowdown obstacle course.”

It was pretty bad in several places—like trying to find your way through a giant game of Pick-Up-Stix. We collected some new scratches and bruises on our legs and joked about “Good thing we got lots of practice with this stuff in Wyoming!”

Finally the trail got better and we were able to make good miles. It was cold all day, and partly cloudy including some dark gray ones that dropped on us a little bit.

DETAILS:  Since the days are getting so much shorter, we tried an experiment this morning, and it seemed to work well.  We “got up” at 5:40, meaning, we sat up and dressed our “top half” (which meant down jacket, too–it’s cold!).  We left our “bottom half” in the sleeping bags.  Then we ate breakfast “in bed.”  Then we finished the get up/pack up routine, and it was light enough to see the trail.  It worked!  I think we will start doing this every morning.

Well, most of the time today we were walking through burn zones.  Apparently there was an enormous fire here a few years ago.  Mountainside after mountainside was  covered with dead, burned, falling down trees.  It was so sad.  A few areas were starting to recover and had baby trees growing.  Some had a bit of grass among the burned tree skeletons.

But then we reached the end of the “logged” trail.  No  trail crews with chain saws had gotten here yet, and it was an unbelievable mess.  Actually, it got to the point where it was completely ridiculous–it was like trying to get through a game of GIANT “Pick-up-Stix”.  We couldn’t just stand there and say, “This is impossible.”  We HAD to get through it.  So we just started joking about, “Well, good thing we got lots of practice on this stuff in Wyoming!”  and “Hey, look, it’s the X-treme Blowdown event!”  And we climbed and scrambled (collecting quite a few scratches and bruises).  It took what seemed like forever, but finally we were across the mess and back on regular trail.  And another good thing was–clouds!  It was cloudy and even dripped just a bit.  Much better than going through this under a hot sun!  The clouds ended up hanging around with a few drips, most of the day.

To add to the fun, we were now almost out of water and had a very late lunch so that we could reach the next water source–a creek.  After that, for awhile, we were back in a “green zone” (so nice!) but then it was back into the burn zone again.  This burn zone was mostly just rocky and messy–no blowdowns.

Later in the afternoon, I noticed that the mountains were changing–getting much more rocky and steep and dramatic-looking.  There were also some lakes!  We passed Phlox Lake–very pretty, with beautiful, crystal clear water.  And we finally made it out of the burn zones, which was nice.

At 7:00 we started looking for a place to camp–not easy.  Everything was steep hillsides and not many clear places.  Down below the trail I saw what looked like a potential camping spot and went to have a look.  Near the spot I had in mind, there was a hole in the ground, which I started to step over but suddenly the ground gave way and down I went, doing a bad scrape on both my shins.  It hurt something awful.  For a couple of minutes I could not even stand up.  Finally I dragged myself up and limped back to the trail and a short time later we spotted a reasonably flat place in the forest.  The only drawback to it was…lots of BEAR poop nearby.  Oh well.

Every step I took was hurting, but a check of my shins showed yes, lots of bad scraping and some bleeding, but nothing that looked serious.  Shins don’t like being banged or scraped–they make such a fuss.  And in spite of the blowdown slowdown, we still made almost 25 miles today.  Hopefully tomorrow we will finally reach the “beautiful Pintlers” that everybody talks about.