Day 17

Long day of river crossings in the washed out valley. Started with about 7 miles and one or two big river crossings before we reached a section of the trail that had been largely washed away by “Hurricane Hillary” in late 2022 I believe.

Spicy had hiked the trail before that and was amazed at how different everything was. When he last hiked there was only a mile or so that was washed out, where you had to basically hike up the river and then find the trail. Now there was 10 miles of wash.

We started in high spirits joking about what we should do for each of today’s river crossings. The plan to each do 10 pushups for each crossing was not brought up again when we reached around 15 for the day 2 miles in.

The river was low enough to safely cross and was currently snaking from wall to wall of the canyon it had once washed out. The day went climb over boulders around 2 ft diameter for 50-500ft on the left or right side of the river, each a bend we couldn’t get around, find the best place to cross, and start over.

I bet we did upwards of 50 crossings.

We made it to just past the end of the was around sunset and set up in a pasture.

Camped at 235.7En savoir plus