Today was a doozy of a day…. 27 miles with crazy elevation gain up and descents straight back down. We started hiking this morning at 8AM and ended our walk around 10:30PM. BUT we knew we had a cabin with showers and beds waiting for us. All that being said, the views were some of the greatest I have ever seen.

Last night, Lost and Found, Tiber, Fully Charged, Spoons, and I camped a mile down near a spring to have easy access to water. That meant we had a mile climb this morning to start off. We got a late start and the term ignorance is bliss applies to our day today. Every mountain we saw off in the distance we ended up climbing. Around 11AM, we had another taste of trail magic as three incredibly nice people hiked up with donuts, pop tarts, lemonade, and Powerade for us. We all stopped and had a great chat. Had we known the difficulty of this hike to start our day, I don’t think we would have made the 27 mile walk to Idyllwild. We also had to walk a steep mile down and back up to grab some water from a spring. Such relief. Now that we’re here though, and I’m showered laying in a bed, I can say it was worth it. It seemed that there was a storm fairly recently as there were at least 20 massive blown down trees on the trail. It slowed our pace to a halt at times as we tried to figure out the best way to navigate. Once we got through the hardest of the trail, we still had 8 miles to go and about 6 of those we walked in the dark.

Scratch, Coffee Break, Beans and some others are staying just down the road from us. Tomorrow we’re going to splurge on pancakes, beer, burgers, and anything else we can get our hands on. We’re burning about seven to eight thousand calories a day and we all notice we’re losing some weight. It seems town days are just everyone’s attempt to gain as much as we can back.

As for now, we’re all patiently waiting our Pizza Hut order in our cabin.

Happy meals…