June 28:Sausage with Wildflowers

We left camp this morning just after our British friends. We would leapfrog them until afternoon. In our morning walking we hit a meadow where the trail just disappeared. There was a bit of snow around the edges of the meadow and no sign of footprints or trail. This is common on the CDT, but not so for this trail. We walked what seemed to be the natural course the trail should take and then spent about 5 min looking for a trace of trail before another actually spotted it in the distance beyond a snow patch. It's always good to know you're on the trail, and it can be extremely frusterating if you lose it or suspect you got onto some side trail. We've been able to stay on the trail very well so far, but I (Mark) am fairly sensitive to direction and pretty good at reading a map when in question. Most hikers carry map pages from the guide books, but some almost never look at them. I sometimes scan them at breaks or if in doubt of the trails direction pull them out. One!
extra minute to confirm my direction is worth it to me. I hate walking a wrong direction and having to back-track. I do carry a compass which I only really use to orient my map to the north.

The terrain today was fairly gradual; we are losing the large elevation climbs of the previous week. We also began to come into a more volcanic landscape. Today actually reminded me of hiking in Oregon. We are leaving the High Sierra behind us. Today was an incredible day for wildflowers. They were out in force. In one saddle there probably 15 different types of flowers within 20 yards of me. We took some nice pictures.

I have to mention we briefly passed 4 weekend hikers, but in our short conversation one guy looked at the other and said, "Hey, did you want to pawn off some of that food?" He said, "yeah, I packed way too much," and pulled out 8oz of sausage! "Would you like it?" I replied, "Certainly!" This is better than getting handed a nugget of gold out here. I love when weekend hikers are generous with extra food (and often they have extra).

We later crossed a road at Ebbetts Pass and took a break just a bit on the other side. I noticed a few ants as I was getting something to eat, but just brushed them off if they crawled on me. Jess watched as I relaxingly took a sip of water and then immediatly shot up from my sitting position spraying water everywhere frantically did a little dance and ripped my shorts down to find and expel a biting ant. Wow! I had no idea the shot of pain one of those little guys could bring. Luckily once he was gone there were no lasting effects. But now I better understand the expression "you got ants in your pants."

Total Miles:1059.4
Miles Today:26.5
Camp 62:Gusty Sunset

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