Its day. Saturday May 4.

It was pretty much just a long string of letdowns. All day long. We started off camped in the canyon. And ah, woke up, walked a few miles and we eatin breakfast when David happened by again. And ah, we learned from David that there was a store just, less than a third of a mile away from the trail. That promised cold drinks and candy bars and snacks. And campfood, and all the whole bit. And we got pretty excited about it and he thought it was just ahead. Somewhere in there my mind nagged me, I thought we’d come further than that. And I also thought I’d seen something that looked an awful lot like a little store a ways back. Needless to say we got psyched up for it anyway and it turned out I was right, I’d already seen the store go by. Looked like it was closed anyway, but we were still sorely let down when we figured out for sure that we’d passed it. And ah, we hit the same hiway the store was on, the trail did, for a stretch. And we kind of ah, half-heartedly tried to get a ride back there, but somehow we knew it wasn’t going to be the case. And we went up ahead and found the trail. It climbed up over the, this dam that we passed. And we kinda walked along the, up along the shore of the reservoir on the other side. And this reservoir was just an ugly, i don’t know, muddy lake. Ah, Camella, if you remember the time we went up to Nambe Falls Reservoir, it was kinda like that. The water was low and you could see that it was just dead mud under the water. It was much bigger than Nambe and there were motorboats and jet skis buzzing all over the surface of the water (imitates buzzing noise) the whole way. And ah, people milling about. It was just pretty much a miserable walk. Although there were some nice flowers on the way.

We kinda pumped ourselves around the reservoir. Found a creek running along the other side and filtered ourselves out a nice drink of water and some more filters. And kinda got the idea that we could finish the day early enough to get to this restaurant thats on Interstate 15. We could finish early enough to hike up after dinner and have a piece of pie for dessert to reward ourselves and make up for missing the, missing the store. And so we go piping along the trail and its kinda rough, and windy, but we do ok and got the idea of dessert for after dinner. And ah, we go ahead and have lunch by a small creek. And lunch was actually really good. We finished off the rest of the loaf of gingerbread that my mom sent us and man, that stuff was just heavenly. And ah, finished off the last of Pete’s mom’s peanut butter and jelly cookies that she sent, and those were also extremely good.

But we kept going, eventually we ah, started getting up around this canyon called Little Horsethief Canyon. And ah, when we finally crossed Little Horsethief Creek, the trail makes a sharp turn and kinda goes up over a ridge to the actual canyon. But it looked like, at this ford, a whole bunch of people had gone off the wrong way, cause there was just a whole trail tread worn out going up the, the wrong canyon basically. And we of course shot of right up that way. Eventually it peters out and the trail gets less and less defined and you end up just kind of in a nasty little canyon. And so we turned around and went back to the crossing. And there was a cairn on the crossing, so we just figured, ‘there’s a cairn, we must be on the right trail’ and headed off down the wrong trail again. And went even farther up the wrong canyon. Well, by the time we had the sense enough to look at the map and figure out exactly what we were doing wrong, we were, we had gone way too far up the canyon, and we had to finally turn around and go all the way back, get on the right trail, and start climbing. And climbed around over a ridge and back into the correct canyon. By that time I was just pissed off and ornery and, I had a rock in my shoe and it wouldn’t go away. When I took it off I couldn’t get it out. And my knee was buggin me. And basically it was just pretty terrible. And pretty much stayed in a bad although it got less bad, through the rest of the day.

Oh, we saw some cool stuff on our down in here. We finally made it to Crowder Canyon. I would say there’s not much chance of us getting to the restaurant for a piece of pie or anything. So we’re jerious of that. But at least we’re here, we got water, we got dinner cooking. So ah, that’s that. We’re gonna head up to the restaurant in the morning for a nice big breakfast. And ah, cause we have to carry water up a 5000 foot climb tomorrow. We have to carry extra water cause its a 23-mile waterless stretch on top of the 5000 foot climb. So we’ve got a rough day ahead of us tommorrow, but at least it’s gonna start off with a restaurant breakfast. Ha!