Day 10
Location: Horseshoe Ridge
Distance: 16 miles
Weather: Warm and humid, sunny in the afternoon
Mood: Sluggish this morning but feeling good later!
After the rain last night, foggy and humid this morning.
After last night's tent waterbed debacle, our shelters were very wet and filthy with mud. Rolling up a wet, dirty tent is one of my least favorite things about being out here, and even though it's about 5 minutes of the day, I feel it starts the whole morning off wrong. I felt the wet tent energy through the morning as we moved through some equally soggy and muddy trail. Every plant and tree that we brushed past was like a wet handshake, and though my pack and shirt started the morning dry, they were no longer by the time we got a bit down the trail. Dad joked that we don't even need to shower now. He's wrong, I smell awful and I'm so looking forward to being able to shower in town at the end of this week!
But as is true on the trail and in life, enough Nutella will make all your problems seem smaller. After lunch (tortillas and Nutella, plus various other dried fruits and snacks) I felt my mood surge and the miles rolled by easily. The sun also came out and started drying everything off. Tents were dry before bed, and there's no more rain on the horizon until the weekend, so I'll enjoy this while I can.
This afternoon we came to and signed one of the log books placed every 10-30 miles along the trail. It's an interesting phenomenon of thru hiking a lesser used trail like this that you mostly never meet the people going the same direction as you. Anyone hiking at your same pace is either just out of reach or permanently behind you. Sometimes faster hikers come up from behind and you share camp or meet them briefly before they're gone. The only way to know who's ahead is through the log entries. We've been following the journey of at least one thru hiker who has been one day ahead of us the whole way. No way to know who is behind us, reading our entries! Nobo (northbound) hikers coming the other way are a bit different. Usually we meet them briefly, only for a few minutes and exchange trail info or restaurant recommendations in town. From that point on, we get to follow their journey backwards in the logs, slowly learning more about the beginning of their trips, but never getting to know how the story ends!
