Day 76, 25.7 miles

Whew, today felt long!! First off, a little housecleaning. This is not very important but from now on I’m rounding off my daily mileages to one decimal point (eg. 25.7 vs 25.74). This is simply because I was using the app Halfmile for recording the most accurate mileage, but there has been a recent trail change that Halfmile did not account for, and so now the whole trail is about 2.5 miles off. Haha. So I’ve switched completely to Guthooks app for keeping track of my mileage.

Today was (almost) as boring as the first paragraph of this blog post. I went downhill forever, got to swim in a river (which was thankfully not boring but amazing!), and then I went uphill FOREVER!! But seriously, here’s an elevation profile of what I did today...

A grade of 100ft/mile is pretty gradual and fairly easy to walk on. 500ft/mile is preeeetty dang steep. 412.7/mile sucks... steep down a long hill for 11 miles, and then steep up a long hill for 11 miles!! Ahhhh!

Pretty morning

The trail ALL day. Aside from when it was a steep grade hugging the cliff side with poison oak growing all around for 11 miles uphil..

Pretty!!

Middle fork of the Feather River

Ok, this place was SO neat! I had heard a lot of people say that you HAD to stop and swim, and they were absolutely right. I got down to the river at around 10am. It wasn’t too terribly hot out but I was definitely sweaty enough for a dip. The water was a great temperature and Painter was there to take a burst shot of me jumping in! There was a huge bridge over the river, and I caught a super cool panorama of it from down below.

The swimming area from up on the bridge

Such a cool shot!

The water was so nice!!

Crazy dreads

View from the sunbathing rock

A creepy exoskeleton thingy near the river

It was such a great spot to stop, and I was back on the trail by noon. I don’t want to complain TOO much about the climb that followed, so just believe me when I say it sucked... I took two breaks on the way up the 11 mile hill, and when I got to the tippy top I had cell service! I was able to call Claire for 15 minutes and she definitely lifted my spirits! :)

This big guy kept landing on me during one of my breaks. He was incredibly hard to catch in a photo

The tippy top!

Bushwhack time (there was quite a bit of this earlier)

Elephant tree?!

Well, that’s pretty much it! Some hard hiking and some sweet swimming. There was pretty much only the river and then that one viewpoint at the top in terms of scenes today. Most of it has just been old clear cuts, normal forest, lots of dirt and dust, and the occasional scree cliffs and bushy streams. 

I was pretty impressed at how ok I still felt today at the 25 mile mark. It felt like I still had 3 or 4 miles in me if I absolutely needed to do them. Like I’m still tired, but not like I was yesterday after 28. And today was full of ups and downs. Hopefully tomorrow will be easier and feel like even less stress on my body! I will hit the teeny town of Belden tomorrow towards the evening. I still have a bunch of food, so I don’t need to resupply. But since it’s on trail I’m definitely going to stop and eat a meal or two!

Thanks for reading!