July 28th, 2024
Mile Marker: 921.2
Miles Hiked: 25
This morning felt hard to get out of our sleeping bags. We tossed and turned and finally decided to get up and out.
We could barely see the sun coming up over the surrounding mountains and I decided to have hot coffee this morning since I knew we would probably finish early today. There wasn’t as much elevation change as the prior two days and we had a hard stop at 25 miles due to a lack of campsites.
Hot coffee on a chilly morning, ain’t nothing like it. Before leaving camp, Whatever let us know about an alternate 3 miles in that cuts off a mile of the original trail. Journey and I were up for it since the trail was the old CDT and made sense.
We took the alternate and followed it along many creeks. We eventually decided to get our shoes wet and wash them out. My shoes were filled with sand and mud from yesterday’s rain and terrain. It felt so good to wash them out and start fresh.
After reconnecting back with the CDT we found ourselves in a gorgeous canyon. This was a very new sight to the CDT. The trail didn’t have us go through here long but it was beautiful!
Around 11:30 we came to a nice flowing creek and decided to stop for an early lunch. The next water was 2 hours away and let’s be real, we were already very hungry.
We didn’t linger here too long since we could tell another storm was about to roll through.
Journey and I headed out and were pleasantly surprised when the trail became a nice gravel road.
The rain started as we walked on this and then eventually it started hailing. At first the hail was tiny little drops and then it started to increase in size. Eventually, it got to the point where it actually hurt and felt like little pinches. I started running hoping to make it to the tree line but the hail backed off before I did. Plus, I was out of breath trying to run uphill with a pack on.
The storm left as quickly as it came and left us humid and hot. We took off all our rain gear and continued on.
A couple more storms acted like they were coming and then skirted around a different way. Some of the time we just got rained on and some of the time we heard the thunder but never got rained on.
It was a day where we always kept our rain gear accessible.
Majority of the afternoon was along a dirt gravel road and I was loving it. It let us maintain a 3 mph pace and wasn’t too steep.
Around 5 we reached Raynold’s Pass and took pictures of the continental divide that we were on.
It felt weird to see so many cars on this highway but I realized we are so close to Yellowstone so everywhere will be a bit busier than what we are used to.
The trail continued on for another 4 miles to camp. Journey and I kept the train moving and arrived at camp at 6 PM, the earliest yet!
We found a camp spot and did some improvements on it to make it as flat as we could and made dinner on this nice little bridge.
We haven’t camped near flowing water in a very long time and are excited for our natural noise machine.
Whatever and Aster made it an hour later. It’s so nice to have other people around. To bounce ideas off of each other and to see what they plan to do. We talked about plans for town tomorrow and what we thought would be best.
We have 20 miles and 2 big climbs to do tomorrow before making it into town so hopefully the weather cooperates!
Sleep well.
Iz and Oz
Izzy + Ozzy 