Day 73 mile 1210.1 – 1232.1, plus 0.4 for water

Elevation: ascent 4,120 ft, descent 4,552 ft

We know the posts are going out a couple of days behind, but since today is July 4th we hope everyone had a fun but safe 4th of July!!!

I woke this morning to a beautiful sunrise and was able to get out of the tent to grab a picture of the colors before the sun truly peaked over the mountains to the east.

After all of the climbing yesterday we decided to sleep in a little to allow our bodies to rest (well as I mentioned I was up early and feeling pretty good). We had a relaxing time getting up still and got moving up the trail by 7:30. Most of the morning we got to see some gorgeous lakes but all of them were far below the trail. Kind of like the trail telling us, to look but don’t touch type of scenario.

Upper and Lower Salmon Lake
Gold Lake
Round Lake

When we weren’t looking down on lakes we found ourselves walking across open meadows and deep forests filled with wildflowers. We both commented on how many different varieties of flowers we have been seeing and love it!!!

The one thing that was super frustrating today, mainly for Double Down, was the inconsistent cell reception we had. She had typed up the blog and was ready to add all of her photos. The problem was that we would find a spot with decent coverage 1-2 bars of LTE, which normally would allow us to work on blog stuff fairly quickly. So the packs would come off and she would go to work on uploading pictures. Then her phone would jump to No Service without even moving, causing us to abandon that spot and move on. After about the fourth stop and very little progress it didn’t seem like she would be able to complete the blog post today. You see we always feel a little sense of unfinished business until our posts are complete. Then at lunch we miraculously found a spot with 2 bars and it was holding, so Double Down was able to get all the pics uploaded and saved.

Double Down hard at work

The day had been going along smoothly, except for the blogging 😬. We both even commented on how good we were feeling and that our bodies seemed to be handling climbs much easier this past week. I think if we would have listened closely to the wind we could have heard the trail gods laughing. We knew we had a climb this afternoon to get to our camp but after handing over 5,000 feet of climbing yesterday how bad could it be. Well the trail gave us a test for sure. It literally felt like we were climbing straight up. At times it felt like we could have used our hands to climb some of the sections.

We thought about stopping at Duck Soup Pond but this would have required an off trail steep descent down to a very buggy looking water source, so we obviously skipped that. This meant we had about .5 miles to the next tent site. We arrived at about 6:30. I then had to venture down an unmaintained trail looking for a spring. I found this one with little problem. Earlier today we had stopped for water at a spring which was supposed to be right off trail except there was no clear trail to it. So after feeling like I was on an Easter Egg hunt I finally found it, 20 minutes later 😡. The only issue with tonight’s spring was trying to fight off mosquitoes while holding the water bags steady enough to fill them up.

We had a quiet night at camp enjoying our dehydrated re-fried beans and lentils 😋. Since we actually have cell service I’m getting my blog done while Double Down checked-in with our kids.

Thanks again for reading! Link