We hiked a tough 15 miles along peaks and ridges, never dropping down into valleys or low spots. We were climbing up a steep rocky hillside and I was struggling – out of breath, tired, and hot. I hear a noise behind me and turn around to see a female hiker just fly past me straight up the hill. She said “Hi!” as she zoomed past, and I just stopped and watched her go. Am I ever going to get these so called “trail legs” that I’m always hearing about? Seems like I’m always struggling and working harder than I thought I would at this point.
Because we were on ridges all day there were no water sources near the trail. When we finally stopped to camp I only had a couple of inches of water left in one of my bottles. I couldn’t cook anything and I was thirsty!
While looking for a campsite we met DoubleDown and Smackdown (brother and sister). They were looking for a guy named The Human Torch (whom we met earlier in the day). The two “Downs” were looking for water too, so we all hiked 1/4 mile down a side canyon to a disgusting cow retention pond. It had algae, mud, smelly stuff, dead bugs, and orange opaque fluid which turned out to be water. I tried to get some but it was so shallow I couldn’t put my water bottle in without hitting the mud bottom. We all decided to pass and hiked back up the ridge to camp.
After laying in my tent and thinking of water I decided to return to the pond and get some anyway. When I got there I found Human Torch camped nearby by himself. He pointed me to some rocks to stand on that someone had thrown into the pond. I thanked him and was able to obtain 2 liters of urine colored water. It was a brownish orange. I took this back up to my camp on the ridge and filtered it through my buff and then through a Sawyer squeeze, then added bleach. It was mostly clear, but tasted like bleach and acidic chemicals. Eeyore gave me some Gatorade mix and that helped to disguise the nastiness. I drank it, and with a lot of imagination it could pass as lemonade? Not really though. I hope I don’t get sick.