Monday, August 25, 2008

August 21:Rain, Rain, Go Away...Pt. 2

We woke up to a steady drizzle outside, and relunctantly began packing up our bags. The only thing that gave me hope was the forecast of sun later in the day. We trudged out into the rain, after noting that the thermometer outside our room read somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees.

The first few hours were miserable. It was cold and wet and showed no sign of letting up. We trudged through a muddy, wet trail, doing our brst to avoid the pools that would form in the divets. I spent a lot of time asking God to calm the storm (he did it once before, right?), but it wasn't until the afternoon that it stopped raining. We saw sun twice for about 10 seconds each time, but it mostly just fogged us in all day. It was unfortunate, because I'm sure we would have had some great views of Mt. Rainier, but we were just thankful it wasn't raining.

Most of the crew camped at Anderson Lake, but there wasn't much room for camping in the one small campsite, so Mark, JZ, and I headed 1.8 more miles down the trail to Dewey Lake.
The first campsite we came to was filled with tents. The next one we found said, "Closed for Restoration," but we were so tired and ready to be dry in our sleeping bags, so we decided to camp there anyway (shhh...don't tell!). We figured we couldn't do much damage since we weren't hanging out there for more than a few hours to sleep.

We were there kind of early since we hadn't taken many breaks because of the rain, but I had eaten and written journals and it was only 7:30pm! It was too cold to do anything other than lay in my sleeping bag (it turned out to be one of the coldest nights of the whole trail), so I was asleep by 7:30pm. Luckily it didn't rain on us and the skies began to clear, bringing smiles to our faces and an expectant hope of a dry day ahead.

Total Miles:2329.8
Miles Today:27.0
Camp 116:"Closed For Restoration"

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