Miles today: 14.6
Total miles: 1494.8
Our options for shelters to aim for today were either 14.6 miles or 24.7 miles. Originally (as in when we were in town planning), we planned to do 24.7 but after our late arrival last night and upon waking up to rain both Delta and I decided 14.6 was fine by us. We laid around in our warm sleeping bags watching the rain for a while this morning since we didn’t have to rush with such low mileage to do today. Two guys came to the shelter at about 930. One was named Hawk and he is hiking south all the way to Springer as a “warm up” for a northbound hike he plans to start in January. I found that absolutely crazy–hiking 1000 miles as preparation?! Not to mention STARTING in January? That just sounds miserable. The other guy was Cash and he was finishing up his hike–he did a northbound this year but missed a section due to an injury so he was making it up. After talking to him for a bit I discovered I’d actually met him back in Vermont–he’d passed along a message from Neon to me when we were trying to meet up to hike together. Small world. It was nice to meet two new people but they were going into town today so we’d be ahead of them at least for a while.
The rain let up and delta and I began hiking around ten or so. The highlight of the day was a climb up Dragon’s Tooth. This was a mountain with a big stone formation on top. You can climb this stone formation, named the Dragon’s Tooth, and see great views of the valley below. The climb up the mountain to it was one of the more difficult climbs in recent memory. It wasn’t terrible but it was actually nice for a change to have a challenge and really sweat it out going uphill. There was even some hand over foot climbing and metal rebar to climb, things we haven’t had since New Hampshire.
It was beautiful up top especially now that the clouds had cleared to reveal autumn blue skies. From Dragons Tooth, the walk to the shelter was mostly downhill and easy and we got to the shelter nice and early even with our late start this morning.