Saturday 9/8/12
Miles 1932-1954 (22 miles)
Oh man, today was a tough day for me. I was so tired. And this morning my stomach felt weird. I was getting that bloated feeling again. :(. My stomach felt like crap and it sucked because the buckle for the hip belt dug right into the belly and made everything worse. Lol! Plus the whole morning we were walking through a huge burn area and that wasn't very visually pleasing, which didn't help. Man it's so nuts, I really feel bad for next years hikers, I've had to go through soooo many burn areas from previous fires, and there were so many more this year. :(. Burn areas are gnarly. The devastation of a forest fire is so much more apparent when you're walking right through it. A few days ago we walked through a recent burn area (fire was a week ago), and it still smelled like fire.
Around 2pm my stomach stopped hurting. And that was when I just got sooooooo tired. UGH. Today just isn't my day! I stopped by a lake to get some water. I saw these guys there with this insane camping setup! Oh my gosh they had so much crap with thin! Lol! They had these huge tents and that game where you have two 3 tiered stands and you throw these balls attached with strings and try to get it to wrap around the stands. They had that whole setup. And a two burner Coleman camping stove. And a huge ice chest. And a cot. And much, much, more. I asked the guys, how the hell did you get all that out there?!? Lol!! There was no road to this lake, btw. They said there were 6 of them and they had about 100 lb packs each, and they put a lot of stuff on the cot and just shouldered it all 3 miles (where the nearest dirt road was). I said, holy crap!! That's the most impressive backpacking setup I've seen!! Haha! That's even more stuff than I see car campers with! These guys all looked like former college football players by the way. Really big buff looking people. That would explain it, I guess. I don't see regular people being able to carry all that stuff.
I hit a wall around 5pm, I was so tired. And I found Hee Haw sitting by a lake. He was in about the same condition I was, but worse. Man, this stomach bug thing really sucks. Hee Haw was making camp there, he was too tired to go further. I ate some food and felt better. We were discussing the negative aspect feeling like crap. This is supposed to be the easiest sections of the whole hike. Oregon is relatively flat in elevation compared to everything else. So, we should be making huge miles right now. Except we're not, because it's so hard to walk while feeling like you have no energy. Plus, we're at the tail end of the surge of thru-hikers, so time is an issue as well. We are cutting it pretty close, because if we don't hurry, the weather in Washigton might not hold out, and if the snow is too bad up north, we might not make it to Canada. So that thought is always kind of a rain cloud over our heads.
I left the lake and found Kyle shortly after. We kept going a bit and camped at this other cool lake. There is a peninsula that goes right to the center of the lake, and that's where we camped. It was pretty epic! I took some pics. Hope I can get to a computer in Bend so I can upload.
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