May 27

Start: .1 mi past sulphur springs
End: messenger flat cg
Daily: 23.4
Total: 407.2

Longest day yet. It was well timed. We woke up at 6:30, and took off right when the sun hit us at 7:20. We actually heard about 5 people pass us while we were still trying to sleep and heard the same conversation twice: 

"Oh, there's a tent there."
"It's huge!" (in the case of the Brits they said it was "jolly big")
"That's a Six Moon Designs Lunar Duo."

I still don't get why people are SO loud around tents in the morning when they can see there's someone sleeping in them. A little courtesy, people.

I'm also not a morning person. Surprise!

Anyway, we walked until we came to the start of the Station Fire detour. A large area burned in the fall of 2009, so last year people had to road walk something like 47 miles around it. Gross. This year, though, we only had to road walk 5 miles on a dirt Forest Service road, which is way easier on the feet than a paved road. Still not fun, but Chris and I are pretty good at entertaining ourselves. 

After we passed a ranger station, we climbed a little, then found a shady spot to sit down and take lunch and a nap. The best nap I've had on trail yet. We also watched a couple of hawks courting each other. 

Then we walked and walked and walked. We knew we had to make it to this campground, because this is one of two the USFS had approved in the burn area (they're afraid fire-damaged trees will fall on us in the night - a valid fear). It just took a while to get here. 

We also made a couple of mistakes regarding water. Both of them turned out to be okay. 

First, we misread the map. We thought it said the next water was 17 miles from where we got water, when it really said it was 25 miles. So we didn't get enough water to let us drink all day and cook food as well. We were conserving water all day, worried we would run out.

Second (and this fixed our first mistake) we didn't pay attention to the water report when it said there was a stream about 5 miles from this campground. So hooray, we drank a bunch there and then got some more, and then we enjoyed pine nut parmesan cous cous and an Annie Chung's soup plus pudding for dinner. 

Oh, and the scariest and coolest part of today: I was walking ahead of Chris a ways, looking at the trail right in front of my feet like thru hikers constantly do, when suddenly a pair of small black eyes met mine from less than three feet away. My subconscious registered a pair of white stripes on a black body and I immediately yelped and ran back along the trail as fast as I could. I don't think my mind even had time to form the word "skunk" before I was at least five feet away. I just knew those stripes meant bad things and I had to get out of there. It turned out to be a baby skunk, about the size of a small cat. It eventually waddled away off the trail. I don't know if it knew that it should be scared of me, or why I was scared of it.