I woke up at 6:30 and started hiking about 8. The sun never hit my tent, as I had just happened to place it where a few trees shaded it from the sunrise.
The first hour and a half of the walk was just climbing up to a pass. There were some wet bits, some forest bits, and some steep bits, but the trail was mostly clear in both senses of the word.
The same couldn’t be said for most of the day. A lot of the trail ahead, including on the descent from the pass, involved connecting marker posts with varying amounts of track between them.
I saw a six point buck still with plenty of velvet trying to get away from me. I stopped under a tree next to a spring for a snack and heard and saw a red-tailed hawk in the distance. I crossed a bunch of creeks. I went through a thick wood with an annoying number of blowdowns.
And then I hit a road and the trail opened up. There was no track, just a hillside covered in bushes and wildflowers. The next marker post was fallen, but they could be followed after that. Eventually, a faint track was visible. Finally, I joined what could have been a road or just a bunch of deep parallel tracks leading up a plateau. Just past the visible high point of the plateau was an immense summer stormcloud. I was getting some good raindrops from its leading edge, and they actually felt pretty nice.
But I couldn’t tell which day the cloud was moving–it hardly seemed to be moving at all. It was supper time, though, and I didn’t want to be rained on while I cooked and ate, so I set up my tent.
At first, there was light rain, then a good wet medium rain with some wind that pushed my rainfly around and let some water onto the tent floor. I adjusted the poles and mopped up the water while my food was cooking and the problem was solved–though the rain had stopped. I could tell by the thunder direction the cloud was high overhead at this point and moving past. The cold wind was still blowing, and I was forced to put on my coat.
Shortly after 7, the trailing edge of the cloud came over and the rain and wind started again. It soon cranked up to 11, just straight pouring buckets. I was glad to not be in it. But I was done with supper and eager to be moving on. I had to wait it out, so I did a few minutes of sewing a ripped seam on my backpack. I lost maybe 45 minutes of what would have been hiking time had the rain not been there.
I packed up and hiked on. At the edge of the plateau, I joined a road that snaked down into the valley/pass area, but I missed the place where I was supposed to leave that road for another road and continued down the next switchback. I noticed it soon and walked straight across the brushy hillside toward the trail. But I had to walk back up nearly to the turn I missed anyway when I got there to get around a fence.
Just a minute or two down the hill from there, I sighted a water trough down the north side of the ridge that contained the point water available for the next 11 trail miles. So I dropped my pack and took my filter bag over there. The sun was getting ready to set behind the clouds at this point. I followed an old road cut down to the grove of trees growing around the spring. I climbed inside the fence, but the water neither looked great or easy to collect there–it had basically settled into a large mud puddle, the kind of mud that sucks at your shoes and wraps around them. I left and went down to the trough it fed instead, where the water was pretty clean and easy to scoop.
After climbing back up to my pack, I didn’t stop to let the water filter. I got out my headlamp and kept hiking down the road into the pass area. I had a good bit more twilight to use. I pulled off into the meadow after 10pm to set up, and had set up my tent before I ever needed to turn the headlamp on. It’s summer, the latitude is high and so am I, and so the twilight lasts pretty late. I didn’t get to sleep until after 11:30, but I did manage to make up for the hiking time lost to the storm.
Trail miles: 15.2
Distance to Leadore: 61.4 miles
connecting posts 
there’s a storm on the way 
dinner tent 
