Harris Bear Spring to Rio Vallecitos

We got up at the usual time and were hiking by 7. I definatly am enjoying hiking with these guys then bigfoot and his guys. Bigfoot and them liked to do big days followed by zeros in towns, we were covering the same mileage but its not my style. These guys I'm hiking with now do between 20-25 which is a nice day with several long breaks. I'm not a fan of the breaks but I'm hiking slower then them so the breaks aren't that long for me. Then when they get town they don't usually take zeros.

I don't remember much about the morning hike except it was very muddy. We ended up getting off train and went west around a mountain instead of east. When we came out we had another hiker named Dutch hike with us a bit before he went zooming off. I know I was supposed to be hiking on the roads but was almost never on them due to the mud. When we stopped for our lunch break we were on this nice mountain top meadow near a stream with this one solitary pine tree. I had just gotten my lunch out and had my pack completely spread out when we got ambushed by a snow thunderstorm. It was a pretty nasty one that had 25+ mph winds and pea sized frozen rain/hail that stung when it hit bare skin. I managed to get my pack back together and throw on some rain gear but had to sacrifice my tortillas to do it. Ah well cold, wet, soggy tortillas aren't that bad... We quickly got moving since we didn't want to be by the one tall spot in a storm that had lightning, we didn't see any but could hear thunder. In my hurry I didn't put on any pants as it was a nice day and I was hiking in shorts and t-shirt until we got ambushed. I had my snow gaiters and though that would be enough. It wasn't. The wind and hail had my knees and exposed legs getting very cold and sore quickly. I found a small stand of trees and put on my windbreaker pants, but by the time I got hiking again the storm had basically blown over and it was just a light snow. Ah well I'll know for next time to not even try hiking without covering all my skin.

Towards the end of the day there was a Ley alternate that had us cutting off 2.2 miles of muddy road for a .7 mile cross country bushwhack. When we came out of the bushwhack there was Dutch who had been hiking much faster than us but with his getting turned around a few times and our shortcut we had covered basically the same distance. The rest of the day was uneventful but annoying. The mud slowed us down and had us scraping it off our shoes and constant temperature changes due to the weather going from rain/hail/sun had us constantly stopping to add or remove layers. We ended up camping .5 miles from the Rio Vallecitos which was supposedly flowing very well and would not be a pleasant river to cross right before bed.