June 17

End: near a spring in a saddle
Daily: 19.8
Total: 736.3

What a hard and beautiful day of hiking. I don't even know where to start...

We woke up next to the Kern River with swallows whizzing past our tent. After saying bye to people we camped with, Chris and I took off at 7:30. We walked next to a creek for a while, and decided to stop and take a break to get some water. As soon as we stopped, the mosquitos swarmed us. We hadn't seen more than two mosquitos since Campo, and now we could kill 8 with one slap.

So we kept going, narrowly avoiding getting lost, like everyone else we talked to, and took a nap for half an hour in the sun away from the skeeters. No one passed us but Unload, and we learned from him that everyone probably got lost at a part of the trail that crossed the river where a different, faint trail went up the hill.

My knee started bothering me around lunch. I don't know what's wrong with it, but the pain comes and goes. I used Chris's knee brace, and that helped.

We ended up making it to a possible campsite way too early to camp, so we took a break and prepared to push on. Then Kristen and Eden came around the corner, so we chatted with them... then 6 more people showed up, so we decided to cook there before moving on. We stayed there over 2 hours. We like our breaks.

In the end, we made it to this spring, almost 20 miles today, with a ton of elevation gain and loss. We're camped at 10,300 ft. It's all forest and dirt, no plants on the ground. It's really pretty.