I woke up at a few stages throughout the night and morning and it was always still raining. Nonetheless, my tent modifications were effective and everything inside was staying dry. I knew from the forecast that it would still be raining out at my usual rising time, and it was. I also knew that it wouldn’t rain all morning, so I decided to just sleep in until it stopped so that I could pack up without getting myself and all my gear wet in the process. It stopped raining about 8am, and with the extra time of changing clothes and getting the tent interior less wet, I didn’t start hiking until 10:30.
Just because it wasn’t raining doesn’t mean it was dry. There was still plenty of pea soup fog to ruin any nice views I might have had all morning otherwise.
I had a late lunch again on a log just as the rain started again. I kept my Packa on and draped my Tyvek over my pack to keep it mostly dry. I had to hunch over my tortillas to keep the rain off the as I prepared my wraps.
Within an hour of lunch, the sun came out. During another stop, I put away the Packa and stuffed a bunch of bars and candy into my pockets so I could eat while I walked for once. Just past this stop, I left the trail and crossed a meadow to get to a road that ran over Fish Lake Mountain before meeting the trail again. On the way up a steep hill, a brief rain started that I put my Packa on again for, but it stopped and I kept climbing with the jacket off. I also took off my down puff that I had been wearing all day because this was the first time I had actually been hot in it.
Eventually, once I had climbed to the prairie on the top of the plateau, I was glad to have come this way once the weather had slightly cleared. There was no protection from the cold wind, so I pulled the jacket on again, but I could actually see some views of the surrounding mountains, and herds of pronghorns running in the distant fields. A few miles of this and I finally rejoined the official trail. Or, more accurately, the trail rejoined the road I was on. It seems pretty likely that the road over the mountain used to be the trail once.
I stopped for supper near this junction. It was much easier than lunch since it wasn’t raining. I got a weather report while cooking and decided to hike all the way to Lake of the Woods on that basis–it wouldn’t be raining all night. The sun was getting low in the sky and the temperature was dripping, so I put up my Packa and put on my down puff again to do another three miles through cow pasture to Lake of the Woods. I arrived around 8:30, just in time to see the full moon rising over the lake. I set up my tent and crawled inside to change for a mostly dry but very cold night.
Trail miles: 17.4
Distance to Pinedale: 56.6 miles
One reply on “Day 104: Lake of the Woods”
They evolved that speed to escape the American Cheetah, an extinct cat that was fast like the African Cheetah but not all that closely related. Now the pronghorn is just ridiculously fast with no living predators that can come anywhere close. They’re also not all that closely related to Old World antelopes.