Miles Hiked: 24.3 (plus 1.5 miles of road walk out of Sierra City)
Gratitude of the Day: I’m thankful for my ex-wife and our marriage. I feel there’s always something to learn and things to grow from, I learned a lot being married about myself, my failures and areas of growth.
Northern California is in a heat wave, and today it’s going to be hot, at 4am the predicted temperature is 75 and there’s an 8 mile, 3000 foot climb out of Sierra City. So I set my alarm for 4:45am and tried to get some sleep. I woke at 4:15 and decided to start the day. Unfortunately that early there’s only one option to get back to trail and that’s walking the uphill road 1.5 miles. So off I went. I got back to trail at 5:30am and started the long morning of climbing. I would stop every hour to take a break and take my pack off, take my shoes off and air the feet out some. This process continued until 10:30 am when I finally created the top of the hill, if only that was the last hill of the day. Then the trail went down 1500 feet Tamarack Lakes. Here I took a small nap and ate lunch. Just as I was packing up to leave, a Land Rover pulled up, it was a photographer from San Francisco and he gave me a cold Coca Cola…. Score on a hot day! Then about a mile down the trail there was a cooler with ice and ice cold tea in to, score two for the hot day!
My feet just felt like I was walking thru concrete all day because of the heat, I ate lunch at an interesting spring called “Pauley Seep”. By then it was starting to cool down and I pushed another 5 miles to camp tonight at an awesome cold spring right off a dirt road. A quick sponge bath before bed and rinse of my sun shirt to get all the sweat out and my day is finally done at 9pm. Tomorrow I plan to get up early again too, it’s like desert hiking here in Northern California, hopefully it cools off in the coming days.
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