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 were quite high, the best choice was to closely follow the creek where the rocks were smaller underfoot. Often the trail became hard to follow, sometimes I could use smaller cairns, sometimes there were boot prints in the sand, but a lot of the time I just had to find my own way through the rocks.

Occasionally, there were spots where the old trail remained on a bank above the washout. In these spots, I could travel twice as fast, with half the effort, but those places were rare. At one point, myself and Ninja thought we saw one of these trails. We climbed up the bank and walked on a sandy path, which faded to grass, and eventually reached a passable, but clearly not on path, gully. We decided to back out and lost about 15 minutes, better than forging into an unknown. Strangely, there was an old boot print in the sand at one point, so we weren’t the only ones to try that option.

Around 5 pm, I reached a campsite which looked quite good. It was nice to arrive at camp before 6 pm, and have a bit of time after setting up to enjoy the daylight. I cooked some fried Spam in grilled tortillas, with a couple of Pop Tarts for dessert. Another early night and long sleep hopefully will help with recovery from San Jacinto the other day.