Today was a really nice day though I am still inexplicably very tired. Perhaps my head office has notified the rest of the body that the works are shutting down soon. Spent from the endless labor, thought of the coming end must have triggered a premature shutdown.

We traded back and forth all day between the north and south sides of a ridge. Since Old Station our primary direction of travel is west. The trail, in a never ending effort to stick to the Pacific geological ridge, has lit out two hundred miles west toward the Marble mountains. Shasta is pretty much at the Oregon border. Our current course will keep us paralleling it, always in view, for the few days. The trail is now close enough to offer a perspective on how this great volcano rises out of the land. Simply a peak on the horizon no longer. To the south we can check out the land, dropping far away below us, that spreads west of the Hat Creek Basin.

I was thinking just now about our friends and loved ones. Taking the challenge of a journey like this is also taking on the burden of others living vicariously through you. There is no way to avoid worrying about disappointing someone. Without making the trip it is impossible to understand the correctness of such a decision as to stop. You must listen to your body and observe all events great and small as they fall into place. Inevitably, such attentiveness will lead you in the right direction. Unfortunately, a supporter of our pursuit has to be content with a phone call declaring, maybe mysteriously, that we have decided to stop. Dyl has decided, by the way, that he has a compressed disk in his back.