Day: 109
Date: Friday, 23 August 2024
Start: Divide Creek
Finish: Coyote Creek
Daily Kilometres: 32.6
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 3175.3
Weather: Cold early then a mild mostly sunny morning. Storms, cold winds and hail in the afternoon. Partly cloudy in the evening.
Accommodation: Tent
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pop tarts/Muesli
Lunch: Snacks/Trail mix
Dinner: Rehydrated meals.
Aches: Dave - the usual niggles; Julie - nothing reported.
Highlight: For the last part of the afternoon we hiked along a broad treeless ridge at around 10000’ with superb mountain views in every direction. It was very windy and cold but, had we been a few hours earlier, we would have been caught in dangerous thunderstorms (see below).
Lowlight: A cold front came through in the early afternoon bringing with it a significant drop in the temperature, strong cold winds, thunder, lightning and hail which turned the ground white and pummelled us mercilessly.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
There had been quite a lot of rain overnight and a little bit of water had got into the tent, maybe because our Tyvek groundsheet was protruding a little. Nothing too serious.
Dave was slow to get going for some reason and it was 6:50am before we started hiking. Initially, we had some nice pine forest walking and descended to picturesque and crystal clear Deadman Lake. From there we followed a 4WD track steeply upwards then across open grazing land, with some cattle visible in the distance. We passed quite close to a couple of RVs camping near Nicholia Creek and some cabins but didn't see anyone apart from one southbound CDT thru-hiker.
The only other person we saw all day was another southbound CDT hiker when we stopped for lunch a few hours later once we had climbed back up into the mountains and forest. This was shortly after the first thunderstorms of the cold front had moved through (see above) and just before the second batch of storms arrived, which saw us sheltering under some trees from the worst of the hail.
After the storm we climbed steadily up to a pass at 9400’ then, after some lovely pine forest walking, we climbed to another pass then followed a broad treeless and very exposed ridge for several kilometres (see above). The views were incredible, but we were so glad we hadn't been up there when the earlier storms had rolled through. Much of the ridge walking was cross-country without much of a discernible trail to follow and our navigation was done by trying to spot marker posts, sometimes more than 400m apart, or using our navigation app. It was slow going on the tussocky grass and we didn't cover as much ground today as hoped.
Around 6:45pm the trail descended below the treeline and we got some water at the first stream we had seen for a while and found a nice tent site squeezed between some pine trees where we camped around 7:15pm at 9000’. It is cold and we'll both be wearing our puffer jackets to bed along with other layers.
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