Friday, August 22, 2014

Day 16 - Campsite 4 on the Dutch Miller Gap trail

If I could wish for anything I'd wish for a hot water spring at the beginning and end of each day. This morning was a dream, hot water at 6 am, lolling about for an hour. A leisurely breakfast and we didn't leave camp till nearly 9 am. Unfortunately we paid for it later in the day when it got hot and humid. 

You know yesterday, when we went down, down, down? Well today we reversed the path and climbed up, up, up. Sometimes gently but often just up. Stepping over logs, roots, rocks, anything the trail threw at us. At one point early in the afternoon the humidity was so high, combined with the heat, that my visor was dripping copious amounts of sweat, wicked away from my head.  Crazy humid. We decided the humidity had to near 90%...the rocks had sweat glistening! As we finally gained altitude it got cooler and an occasional breeze dried up some of the sweat. Shesh. 

The plan was to hike 12 or so miles and get to Lake Ivanhoe tonight but around 4:30 I finally had to fess up and say I couldn't go any farther today. The last likely camp site was a couple of miles from our planned stop and 800' lower than Dutch Miller Gap at 4,970'. Too much for the end of the day. 

The good news is we are in the most beautiful spot we've seen all day. A green meadow with towering mountains surrounding the meadows. Most of them are not named on the map - the only named is Iron Cap Mountain. Big. So even if we are a couple miles shy of the hoped for goal we still walked a goodly amount. And I feel each and every stair master step. 
Setting up
River crossing, the civilized way. 
L using her tiny, tiny water color set. Wow. She is not afraid of color. 





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