The cold wind made it hard to get up in the morning and hard to do anything in the way of packing up and filtering water. Even with a coat on, I was trying my best to avoid the shade. As such, in spite of my best intentions, I didn’t make it onto the trail until 9:30.
It was a beautiful section of trail, views either of Lake Baldwin or the distant, wide desert plain all day long, but the cold wind persisted all day and there was little shelter from it.
Indeed, there was hardly even a good place to sit down, much less out of the wind. I found one such spot around lunchtime, a log below the trail on the leeward side of the ridge, but someone else had found the same spot not too long before and left something on the ground nearby which, by its proximity, slightly detracted from the flavor of my lunch. Still better than sitting in the freezing wind though.
An hour or two after sunset, I turned aside at a road for the nearby Coon Creek Cabin, a closed group camp with several decrepit old cabins. The largest one would have once been quite a nice home as log cabins go, but with its stone floors and many doorless doorways and glass-free windows, it would have been a terrible place to sleep. However, behind it was a smaller building with a dirt floor and at least one wall lacking any such opening. It would serve as an adequate if imperfect windbreak. I pitched my tent inside while cooking dinner.
Before I was done eating, I heard a car arrive, unintelligible voices from the other side of the big cabin. I turned my light off and laid low. At first, it was simply because of the possibility of it being the authorities enforcing the camp closure, but even when I saw that it was a couple on some kind of midnight date climbing the hill behind the cabin, I still kept my presence hidden if only to let them think they had the place to themselves.
Around the time they finally left, I was ready to crawl into my tent, blog, and sleep.
Total distance: 22 miles
