Day 178: more rain. Boo. :(

Saturday 10/13/12
Miles 2,538.5-2,557.5 (19 miles)
Elevation 4,583'

"The sun will come out...tomorrow! Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun...". That's what I woke up Kyle with this morning, my singing. Haha. Actually I wake up Kyle many mornings with my singing. I'm not a good singer by the way. Lol. Sometimes I recite nursery rhymes, sometimes I make up words to the melody of a song I know. Lol! Anyways, Kyle says, no, we will have sun today! And in the morning it looked like the sun was trying to come out. But alas, it didn't.

We didn't get moving today til after 10:30. Mainly because we didn't want to have to put cold and wet clothes back on. Lol! Th nice thing is that once you're walking, you warm up. The difficulty here is the getting going part. :)

So, everything is damp. I woke up several times in the middle of the night to wipe down the inside of the tent, hoping the condensation wouldn't start dripping on the sleeping bags. It didn't. Whew! Still though, the bags are wet. Uuugh. I hate packing away a damp sleeping bag. Usually, only a small part of the bag would be wet, but when you pack it into the compression sack, the moisture spreads and more of the down feathers become damp, and wet down does not insulate. We still have a couple more nights on trail and it would really suck if my bag didn't stay warm :( I was hoping all day we'd get some sun so I could dry stuff out. The tent is soaked inside and out, too. Plus wet stuff is *heavy*. Ugh. It never got sunny. :(. However, it didn't rain much today. Most of it was that falling mist stuff.

Whenever I'm not having a good day, I think about what I'm immediately grateful for and it really helps. Like, I am grateful that even though it's raining and cold, it's not *that* cold. And I'm grateful that the elevation chart today was much nicer than yesterday. :)

Hiking downhill in the rain is kinda gnarly. The trail basically becomes a stream and some parts are like a slip n slide. :( I gave Kyle one of my trekking poles so he wouldn't fall as much. But yeah, going downhill is gnarly, I can't imagine doing that without trekking poles, like some people do.

Today we had the infamous Suiattle River crossing. In 2003 a huge storm washed out the old bridge and so hikers had to shimmy across a log over a raging river. Last year a new bridge was built downstream, adding 5 miles to the trail. At first Kyle and I were like, no way we're going to do an extra 5 miles! But we ended up taking the new route because we figured it was safer. It would be so lame to get injured at this point of the hike. :(. The new bridge was really cool. We were both ultimately stoked we took this route and not the log crossing.

The elevation and terrain for today was *much* better than yesterday. We got 19 miles in by 9pm, even with our late start! Stoked! Setting up the tent was not fun though. It was completely soaked. I had to crawl around inside and wipe down the entire inside 3 times just so water wouldn't drip on us. Boo. :(

Well, our clothes and sleeping bags are dryish. My bag has lost a lot of loft from the moisture. However, it is still warm, yay! The thing that sucks about the tent being already wet on the inside is that condensation happens exponentially faster. I probably will have to wake up multiple times throughout the night to wipe the tent so it won't drip water on us. Oh, we're using both of our space blankets to line the inside floor of the tent. My silver emergency blanket. Oh my god I love that thing, it has come in handy so many times for various things. If it weren't for that space blanket we would be completely soaked, because the bottom of the tent is so wet.