Mostly a success

Monday I pulled together my gear, enough food for roughly two days, and drove to Henry W. Coe state park. This is the park from my first post and in a funny turn of events I walked by where Craig and I has hunkered down for the night under emergency blankets. By 11am I started out on the 13.8 mile journey to my campsite. Two hours into my walk at 7.6 miles I was feeling great. I started to believe that 20 miles a day wouldn’t be to bad. Then at mile 11 the blisters started. I've never gotten blisters backpacking or with the type of shoes I was wearing. Even more odd was that all of them were on my left foot toes. By mile 13 I hit Kelly Lake and instead of continuing the last 0.8 miles to Coit Lake I set up camp and called it a day. The next morning the walk back became progressively more painful as one blister grew to the size of half my big toe, and despite the extra layers of socks and bandaids, popped. The last 2.2 miles were a pathetic hobble. It immediately became clear that if this was to happen on the the PCT I would have to wait days to recover or call it off all together. This is great information to have and in my next outing I’ll be using liner toe socks and maybe a size larger shoe.

While the blisters were the fail part of the hike, they were eclipsed by the win of having no knee pain. Reducing my pack weight to under 20 pounds including food and water did the trick for me knees. I walked 26 miles in two days and other than some calve and hip soreness everything was fine. I’ll be back to Henry W. Coe in a couple weeks to try a three day trip with a total of over 30 miles. Hopefully by then I’ll have the blisters issue under better control.

Robert’s wildlife extravaganza:

• Bobcat (Watched me from the side of the road then slunk off into the underbrush)
• Rabbits
• Desiccated salamander corpses (A ton were strewn throughout the trail)
• Recently deceased Turkey Vulture (I’d never seen one up close before)
• Deer
• Cattle (Ran away from me faster than the Bobcat)
• Ducks
• Frogs
• Hawks from afar (I used to play bass for Hawks From Afar)
• Coastal Cutthroat Trout
• Lizards
• Turkeys