Day 52 - Friday, June 18

Tenting near a creek (mile 887.4).  Walked 23.7 miles today.

Woke up about 2 am to lightning in the distance.  My rain fly was halfway off my tent because last evening, Frank and I wanted to be able to see each other and talk while eating dinner in our tents to avoid the mosquitoes.  I strapped the remaining side down and rehooked the vestibule to its stake, but didn't want to get out of the tent to rehook the ties that hold the fly away from the side of my tent.  Shortly after, it began raining steadily and the lightning picked up.  All I could think was "please don't start a wildfire...". Everything calmed down after an hour and a half or so and I could go back to sleep.  Awoke about 5 and slowly got ready in my tent.  The rain had made that one side that I didn't rehook a little wet, but nothing got wet.  Made a mad dash outside, took the tent down, packed up, and headed off before Frank was even out of her tent.  I told her I'd meet her at Seldon Pass, 2 miles away.

Climbed up to the pass and found a spot to sit, wait, and enjoy the view.

After a few minutes the mosquitoes found me and I put on my head net.  After a few more minutes, I could no longer stand it and wrote a note in the dirt:

Frank - 

MOSQUITOES

Pushed on

-BN

Started down from the pass and my knee started hurting slightly.  Stopped and stretched about every 100 yards and by the bottom I felt pretty good.  Not too far after, I came across Hot Pink, Rambo, and Sure Foot who were packing up camp.  We chatted briefly about our thunderstorm experiences last night and then all set off down the trail together once Frank had caught up.  We walked and chatted until reaching Bear Creek: another notorious river crossing.

We again took off our shoes and carefully waded across with the water coming up only to mid-calf again.  Dried off on the other side and put our bug nets on because the mosquitoes are the pretty intense.  Hiked on and began a very steep climb.

At the top, I dried out my tent and then ate lunch.  Frank showed up shortly after and within 10 minutes, my stuff was dry (I love the lack of humidity in tht west!).

Began a strep downnhill and we got a fewsprinkles of rsin.  This was followed by a long and strep climb to silver Pass.  One section was 1300 feet per mile (as a comparison, when we see something 500 feet per mile we start freaking out because that's pretty steep).  I put on music and powered up it and got to our check in point and waited for Frank to show.  Right when she did, there was a clap of thunder.  Had i been by myself I wouldn't have gone over the pass in these conditions, but I felt more comfortable with someone else here.  We hiked the 1.5 miles to the pass with no more thunder.

Got to almost the top and suddenly it thundered again.  At the top we saw it was far away so we felt ok then. My feet hurt so I climbed down slowly over the uneven terrain.  There were a lot of people at the camp we chose, so we just went up the trail to another 0.1 miles to a site with nobody there...probably because of the horrible mosquitoes.  Ate in our tents again and turned in for the night, exhausted after a double pass day.