Observations

I am set up in the yard of the Frenchglen Hotel now and am just waiting for the dinner bell at 6:30.  It's super windy and dark but we've had no rain to speak of yet.  I went through a lot of hard wind today as well as short stretches of rain and even a little hail.  Several times the wind was so hard it was almost blowing me over.  Once again the trekking poles helped immensely.  They were also useful on stream Crossings, uphill, downhill, uneven ground, as tent Stakes, and to poke around for snakes before stepping or sitting somewhere.  My tent held up very well and kept me dry in driving  torrential rain and high wind.  Going without a stove also worked well though I've started to run out of energy earlier in the day the past 2 or 3 days.  I wonder if it has to do with my diet of energy bars, Fritos, canned meat, instant oatmeal, peanut M&M's and gorp.  Ya' think maybe?  The Gaia GPS app on my phone got me here fine but I sometimes didn't like how long it took to load and find my exact location.  I also had two instances of setting waypoints that turned out to be way off from where they should have been.  I have no idea what I did wrong but hope I can figure it out later.  I started out hoping to average 15 miles a day and ended up doing 16.3 so I'm satisfied.  Everyday had good points and not so good points and overall it was very tough. I would be on the trail each morning at 6 to 6:30 and end the day between 3 and 5 to do a lot of laying in the tent trying to recover and drinking lots of water.  Uploading pictures to the blog with my Verizon service has often been achingly slow, often because service wouldn't last long enough to get it done.  Such is the case now or I would have some pictures for you. Would I do this again?  Nope, though I'm feeling pretty good about finishing right now.