Day 8: Friday, May

(Stud) I woke up on the wrong side of the sleeping bag this morning. My cold kicked in and I was mentally foggy and moody all day. My nose was running like a sieve.

Not long after we got on the trail Dwight noticed that my pack was wet on the bottom. That could pretty much mean only one thing: I hadn't tightened the drinking tube on my water bladder tight enough. I pulled off my pack and started throwing the contents all over the trail like a mad woman. Crap! Among other things, my sleeping bag was wet. I hung several things to dry off the back of my pack and when we stoped to take breaks I pulled out my sleeping bag to dry. It was fine by day's end.

The wind gusted heavily ALL day--enough to physically move me when it caught me just right. A day hiker estimated it at up to 40 mph. It was really tiring to hike in.

At a water cache we met a hiker named Slim with a heavy southern accent. Turns out he was originally fom Aiken, SC--now living in Johnson City, TN. He said he'd heard there was a couple from Blythewood, SC on the trail this year. "That would be us", we told him.

Late in the afternoon we started looking for a place to camp that was a least somewhat sheltered from the wind. Dwight found a low area in a wash--but since it looked like it might rain, neither Leslie or I wanted to tent there. We hiked on and settled on a small open space under some dense shrubby trees just off the trail. It took some work to get our tarp tied down and we had rocks reinforcing every stake.

It seemed within a few minutes of laying out our sleeping bags, everything was covered in dirt including what seemed like a whole cup INSIDE my sleeping bag, but I guess we'll just dust things off in the morning.

As we were getting ready for dinner the ladies from Montana arrived and set up camp nearby. We met them on our first day at Lake Morena and they are so much fun. They all work for the Montana Forest Service--Glacier as a Soil Conservationist, Jukebox Lucy as an Environmental Biologist and Fuzzy Bee as an Ecologist. The 3 of them have backpacked together a lot. Only Glacier is going all the way to Canada--Fuzzy and Jutebox leave us in a few days at Idyllwild. They don't mind going back to work because this time of year they start their field work. We'll miss them because they're always laughing and cutting up.