Today wasn’t the longest day, with only 9.3 miles or 15 km covered. It was a bit of a slog though, mostly washed out trail and river bashing. Tiresome work. To be honest though, it wasn’t as bad as I’ve heard from rumours, certainly it’s no Hapuku River Valley.

The trail started out fairly smoothly. When it dropped into the wash, there was still a clear path to follow. Large cairns marked the way and the footsteps of hundreds of hikers before me were clear in the gravel. The cairns soon become more scarce though, and the footsteps began to follow multiple different paths through the riverbed.

In places, the edges of the washout was quite high, the only choice is to closely follow the creek where the rocks are smaller underfoot. Often the trail becomes hard to follow, sometimes I can use smaller cairns, sometimes there are bootprints in the sand, but a lot of the time I just have to find my own way through the rocks.

Occasionally, there are spots where the old trail remains on a bank above the washout. In these spots, I can travel twice as fast, with half the effort, but these places are rare. At one point, myself and another hiker think we see one of these trails. We climb up the bank and walk on a sandy path, which fades to grass, and eventually reaches a passable, but clearly not on path, gully. We decide to back out and lose about 15 minutes, but it’s better than forging into an unknown. Strangely, there was an old bootprint in the sand at one point, so we weren’t the only ones to try that option.

Around 5 pm, I reach a campsite which looks quite good. It’s nice to arrive at camp before 6 pm, and have a bit of time after setting up to enjoy the daylight. I cook some fried Spam in grilled tortillas, with a couple of Pop Tarts for dessert ye haw. Another early night and long sleep helps with recovery from San Jacinto the other day.