It didn’t rain all night, but it was very cold. I learned even before I fell asleep that the sleeping bag I bought last year for extra warmth has gotten its stuffing so compacted and moved around that it didn’t provide nearly as much warmth as it once did. But even though it was still slightly cold all dressed up in the bag, it was colder still outside it, and yet colder with even the inner tent flaps open to let the breeze in.
When it’s that cold, I don’t get up before sunrise. I would rather go to bed late and get up late in winter weather. So I rolled over and over to stay in my bag in my tent until 6:30 when it started getting light out. The first thing I did was grabbed my towel to mop up the expected condensation from camping near a lake on a cold night. But when I went to do the same for the fly, it only crackled. It had been cold enough to turn the condensation into frost. There was even a layer of frost on the part of my backpack that wasn’t under the fly. And it was nearly that cold still. Just another August morning in Wyoming, I guess.
Obviously, I stalled as much as possible the putting on of wet socks and shoes and packed up everything I could pack before opening the outer flap to let all the heat out. The sun was firmly in the sky by the time I did that. And the wet boots didn’t end up being that bad. What with stopping to stand in the sun or tuck my fingers between my legs, I was very nearly packed before my fingers and toes were painfully cold and losing feeling. I took off my jacket at the last minute, packed it up, and hiked out around the lake around quarter to nine. Which, you know, was still an earlier start than the last two days.
The trail walked along the dam on the southern end of the lake keeping it from spilling into the much lower meadow on the other side. I can only assume the dam was artificial, but it was old enough to be completely overgrown with trees, which in turn had fallen all across the trail. Right off the bat, I was introduced to the theme of the day: navigating piles of blowdowns over the trail.
I also got a number of animal sightings in. Aside from the cows, herds of which parted before me every time I crossed a meadow, I also saw a deer right off the bat.
I kept seeing small groups of pronghorns in the next long pasture I crossed, sharing the area with the myriad cows, but by the time I reached the other end, they had joined together into a massive but tight cluster of at least 50 of them. I felt like I was on the Serengeti for a moment.
After a short break where the trail briefly entered the trees (as they provided a convenient windbreak for that ever-present chilly breeze), I stopped at a small lake 3 miles in to watch a beaver swimming, at which point Cliff Richards and Lost Keys appeared suddenly behind me. They had cut across a meadow and avoided visiting the lake for some reason. I chatted for a moment about our plans for the next few days and the weather (an especially interesting topic of late) but excused myself as quickly as possible to get some miles in and give Cliff some privacy to take his long johns off.
I committed to not stopping for lunch until 2, crossed a meadow and a creek, and plunged into the next forested section. Once again, there were myriad blowdowns constantly sending me off-trail, and on one such diversion, the rain started falling. I stopped to put on my Packa and got back to work just as the clouds opened up with fifteen minutes of Dippin’ Dots sized hail. It subsided to normal rain, then reprised this performance fifteen minutes later while I was navigating the nastiest stack of trees in the section. After that was a slight lull in the rain, so I finally stopped for lunch. It rained more while I ate, but not heavily, and it did not hail again at all. There was some pretty intense lightning during the next climb though.
Finally, I came up to Gunsight Pass, which wasn’t much of a climb to the top, and didn’t offer much of a view due to the rain, I got a nice respite from the blowdowns as I descended to the Roaring Fork. I crossed the river with blowdowns as bridges (even though my boots and socks were already soaked from the rain), and then had to cross the thickest blowdown-filled section yet. But once I had picked my way across that, I was treated to an easy, muddy traverse across to the edge of the Green River Valley.
It stopped raining for minutes at a time at this point, and the sun was even briefly visible on a couple of occasions. I took advantage of one of those short windows to get a snack break in that could carry me to my destination. Then I came to the edge of the ridge that dropped into the valley and could actually see the whole thing spread out before me. Yet again, it stopped raining long enough for me to drop my pack and climb up on a trail boulder and get a panorama. Then I was making the long descent into the valley.
Along this descent, I saw a couple of bull mooses below the trail, one with an enormous rack, but they didn’t stick around long enough to even get my phone out.
Finally, with the rain picking up again, I reached the edge of the Green River. I was planning on heading over to the campground on the other side to make dinner, but there was a fortuitously placed abandoned log cabin with a sod roof nearby I needed to check out. It was completely dry inside, so obviously I decided to make dinner right there. I watched two deer work their way across the meadow from one side of the cabin to the other while I ate.
Right next to it was another smaller cabin with a dirt floor, also pretty dry, so I pitched my tent there while my dessert tea was steeping. I was briefly accosted by a little brown bat during this and got a very good look at it climbing up the wall and out an exit of its own. This was my last animal sighting of the day. I went back to drink my dessert, brush my teeth, then fetch my pack and everything I would need to sleep into the smaller cabin. I would go to bed without having to worry about the rain, though the shifting cold winds and dropping temperatures would still be a concern in the little cabin with open holes for windows.
Indeed, around 11pm, the wind was whipping my tent flaps around so much it woke me. I finally decided to get up and check on the Packa I had hanging in the other cabin. I put my bare feet in my cold wet boots and climbed out into that wind to find my ground cloth all folded up and some bags sent to the other side of the room. The Packa was fine as the other cabin didn’t catch wind from that direction very well, but I took it down and put it against the wall anyway. By morning the wind would have shifted to a direction that could have torn it apart with blowing. Then I returned to my tent to start the process of warming my freezing toes up again from zero. Within an hour, another thunderstorm was raging outside, but I had tightened up my tent guy lines and had nothing left to worry about, so I let the thunder put me to sleep.
Trail miles: 18.0
Distance to Pinedale: 38.6 miles
Cliff Richards and Lost Keys 
