Day 17 - Freshie Burn

June 5th

19.2 Miles

Camped along the river somewhere

Getting up at a campground and eating breakfast on a picnic table is a nice thing in the morning. The simple things in life makes things a tad better. I felt better overall after a short day yesterday, my feet are tons better and the blisters are mostly gone and callused. I can't wait for them to get all callused and stop hurting in a couple days (hopefully). We cruised through the first valley along the river which was a Lay shortcut and enjoyable as opposed to hiking up and back and around another valley which seemed illogical and out of the way. 

After that valley we reentered burn area but it was a tad different than previous burn areas. This area was a recent burn in the last year or two. The trees were still charred, ground still dirt ridden and overturned with no new undergrowth. It was a pretty neat looking area. In addition, trail crews have been hard at work repairing the trail area which was awesome. We ate lunch under the cover of our umbrellas due to the complete lack of shade anywhere. Then we started to climbing following the river up the valley to a pass. It was burned and exposed but quite scenic because you could see the mountains in full due to the lack of living trees. Ontop of the pass the clouds began to build which I didn't like. It look liked a storm was building. We continued down into the next valley along Welcome Creek and past welcome pass which had an impressive rock feature near it with wild flowers blanketing underneath. Dinner was eaten at a guard station and we hung around for a while watching the clouds darken and head towards us. We expected to wait out the storm there über the porch roof but the sky never opened up and it passed over. After a few miles the sky darkened again and we had the decision to hunker down or put in a few more mile to get over 20 for the day. Then it began drizzling, decision made! We hunkered down for the night and stayed dry.