Got up feeling excited about today's hike. All the nobos were saying it's the most difficult section in terms of terrain. They were right. I had to hike along a mountain range for 12 miles until the was a valley that would let me go south. It was completely cross country of course. The part that made our difficult was the ravines and washes coming down the mountains. At first it wasn't bad at all and I did 3.5 miles in an hour and 15 minutes. But then I hit the ravines. It was just up and down for 9 miles straight. The ground was a gravely rocky mix filled with very angry thorny bushes. Of course the ravines weren't just up and down they had some steep cliffs that you had to hike way out of your way to traverse or just take your chances and scramble down hoping your footing holds. There was a road parallel to this so you could skip it but that's the easy way, you know for northbounders.
I eventually finished that stretch out of water and way tired right at the heat of the day, 130. There is a water cache here and rather than hike 3 more ravines then backtrack to the cache I just followed a wash down. I had damn good timing cause that was when all the shuttles showed up at the cache, and there were a lot of then today. All told 18 hikers had gotten dropped off. The shuttle drivers saw me coming down the mountain and all stopped thinking I was a hiker calling it quits, but I just wanted to get there and confirm that the shuttle would be there in the morning and they knew I'd be there too. The water cache was kinda spooky, it seems one of the bottles had a leak and the entire thing was swarming with bees. They didn't care about me and just wanted the water but too many bees too close for comfort. I'm not even allergic but with the amount of bees I'd be a goner if any of the swarms I saw decidedto attack. There was a girl with her 3 big malamut mutts that was just setting up her camper and told me I could rest under the shade for a bit. I was going to take a break anyway and this let me rest by the cache so I could camel up properly.
As I was packing up to hike again at 3 two hikers came strolling in. They were the girl with the campers. They were crazy fast since they had to have hiked that first stretch of 13 miles uphill most of the way in about 4 hours. Anyway I knew I'd have to camp dry so I was packing 4 liters out for 13 easy miles, I knew I had too much but I wanted to have done extra for sitting around and waiting for the shuttle tomorrow. It's a good thing I did pack that much up. After about the 6th hiker I passed I started getting told that there was a guy who was way underprepared and was struggling. That I should keep an eye out for him just in case. They were right, when I found him he still had 5.5 miles and 400 ft. to go and he was completely dehydrated and out of water. It's a good thing the others told me about him cause I started saving my water at that point so I still had 3.5 liters left. I ended up giving him 2.5 of it keeping 1 for myself. I probably should have kept more but considering he'd give through 4 already and was only 2/3 the way I decided he needed it more. After getting him hydrated up and giving him some unsolicited advice, like don't try hiking 400 miles while fasting, I decided that he was in as good shape as I could get him short of hiking back to the water cache with him and not seeing the start of the trail, so I left him. I only had an hour and half of daylight left so I wasn't going to make my planned campsite, plus being very low on water I wanted to try get as much hiking in between now and dark. I did pretty well, covered 4 miles in an hour and half with only drinking a quarter liter. At that point it was dark, I was tired and thirsty and called it a night.
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