On the fourth day out here, we experienced very cold rain that downpour nearly all day. About 30 of us creamed into a tiny lean-to style shelter, and the rain fell sideways, still managing to soak a lot of us inside. One gentleman with diabetes had a very scary moment, but our little community contributed sugar and blankets to warm him up and he ended up okay. None of us felt like we could get warm and everything managed to get wet. Setting up our rain fly in the downpour was an interesting experience!

Before getting to the shelter, Riley and I decided to hike the 5 miles there without eating a single bite of food and we were low on water because we stealth camped the previous night. When we finally arrived, I was so cold and exhausted that I could barely open a granola bar with my hands shaking. I decided it would be a brilliant idea to cook my soup on the picnic table in the shelter, where other people were doing the same. When my beans weren't fully cooked from the boiling water, I naively turned my jet boil back on and it almost instantly began to boil over. In my haste to turn off the flame, I broke off the ignitor and I couldn't twist it off and had to blow it out. A gentleman across from me helped and quickly twisted off the fuel canister so that it wasn't leaking. Luckily he was also an engineer and was able to fix my ignitor. So, now I have my trail name : Sparky, because I'm a fire hazard.

The soup was everywhere and made a huge mess to clean up that resembled vomit. I cleaned it all up as best I could with the wet wipes that were available and left the soupy mess in my stove to clean up later after the rain. With it in the bear box, I didn't have the ability to cook dinner later, but somebody let me boil water with their stove so that I was able to get extra calories to stay warm for the night. The hiking community is truly humanity at its best, lending helping hands where needed because we're all in this together. I also learned that the bear box lids will fall on your head if you don't hold onto them.

Around 4:30 pm, the rain finally let up and those of us who stayed at camp had some respite. Many others left for town, particularly those whose gear was soaked and ran a real risk of hypothermia. A fog settled in that looked like something straight out of a Stephen King novel. It ended up only sprinkling throughout the night and I was surprisingly the warmest I've been yet.