TRT Day 2 Getting used to it

Today we tried out part of our new philosophy of backpacking. We hiked before eating breakfast. Energywise this worked great. Timing was thrown off because we didn't end up eating dinner until after 8pm. I was very hunger for dinner but too anxious to eat enough. I guess I'll be hungry in the morning.

The three people that we camped with left before us. We caught up with them twice but didn't get very far ahead because of our breaks. That's another change in philosophy for us. We timed our breaks, about 10-15 mins every hour or so. We took the breaks even when we weren't too tired. When you know that you need to cover 15 miles, you know that you'll be hiking all day, so why be exhausted for the last bit?

We crossed many day hikers climbing up to Snow Valley Peak, so we knew we were getting closer to the next trailhead (Spooner Summit). Sometimes I feel proud to be a backpacker- other times just silly.

We accidentally spent 2 hours at Spooner Lake for lunch. This was our first major water stop. We're entering a part of the trail that we've been warned doesn't have many water sources for the next 20 miles or so (a little over a day away). Together we can carry 7 liters of water. To lose weight, we left the pump part of our water filter at home and opted for gravity. Only bad thing is that gravity is slow, especially for 7 liters. We'll have to finesse this our water techniques as we go, this was way too much time for lunch!

We crossed our first sites of civilization in 36 hours, a four lane highway US-50 (opposite side of the lake from where we entered yesterday). As always, you drop elevation coming into a trailhead and then you immediately gain elevation leaving a trailhead.

As the evening came on, Grant and I, still spooked about mountain lions and bears, same songs together to "scare" away the wildlife. This also made going uphill a little easier. This evening we chose to camp close to the lookout/vista at South Camp Peal. Almost as far as we wanted to go for today.

Tomorrow we look forward to 7 miles of trail, ~5 miles of road in between trail heads, then 3+ more miles of trail. People, cars, stores, hills. The feet are cranky but not in too much pain. My legs are stiff until warmed up a mile in or so. Quite the opposite of Grant who is ready to go once on his feet and then slows down. My shoulder hurt. Good thing we're eating to lighter backpacks.