Day: 035
Date: Monday, 10 June 2024
Start: Mogotito
Finish: Rio Vallecitos
Daily Kilometres: 35.5
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1049.0
Weather: Cold early then cool and overcast all day with occasional light rain. Thunderstorms about in the evening.
Accommodation: Tent
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pop tarts/ Muesli
Lunch: Trail mix
Dinner: Rehydrated meal/Chicken & rice
Aches: Dave - the usual niggles; Julie - nothing reported.
Highlight: In mid-afternoon, after climbing steadily most of the day, we reached the headwaters of Canjilon Creek in a vast remote green grass valley bordered by pine forests.
Lowlight: Rain, on and off, during our morning hiking along trails through sodden undergrowth and dripping vegetation, when we were already cold and a bit wet, was not much fun.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
It rained lightly much of the night but had stopped when we got up at 5am. However, wiping down condensation inside the tent and rain off the flysheet before we packed it away made us a little later than usual and we didn't start hiking until 6:15am.
It was cold and damp, with occasional light rain showers for much of the morning and the vegetation was scrubby and wet and the trail a bit overgrown. We were quite high and had occasional views across the valleys and hills and saw a distant herd of elk(?) running. Later, we surprised a couple in the forest, but didn't get a good look at them before they raced off.
As we steadily climbed, the vegetation turned more to forest and the feel became more alpine. We noticed that a lot of the downed trees across the trail has recently been cut and cleared and when we reached a trailhead with a car park there were several Conservation Corps vehicles there, along with a picnic bench, toilet and trash can … ideal.
We ate lunch and the workers returned along the trail we followed after lunch and, sure enough, more downed trees had recently been cleared. (We weren't so lucky later in the afternoon when we had to climb over many downed trees.)
After lunch we followed a creek upstream to its headwaters in an alpine valley through some beautiful forest with occasional snow patches. It was the best hiking of the day and we reached an altitude of 10500’.
Most of the latter part of the afternoon was a gradual descent through beautiful pine forest and across grassy meadows. We stopped a little earlier than usual, 5:40pm, at a spot on a ridge where we hope a breeze will help dry the tent and reduce overnight condensation if it rains again.
It did start raining again once we were in the tent, but not for long. Tomorrow's forecast is better.
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