Jammin' with Jameson

17 miles. I ended up waking up around 7:45, 2 hours later than I originally planned, because I was exhausted from going to bed at 11 and saw the forecast shouldn’t be as bad as we expected. My 2 hours of sleep was traded for 2 hours of intense heat. I also forgot to mention that I couldn’t find spf lip balm before starting so my lips got badly burned 3 or 4 days in and had now completely cracked. It was mostly just a major annoyance so I tried to remind myself it could be much worse, but I had dreams about it because I was beginning to notice the pain so much. As I was almost done packing up, I hollered at Flo and Swell as they passed by. They came down to take a breakfast break and chill. We all ended up climbing up the mini tunnel that was created from the massive boulders that I had slept underneath. Today was the big push up San Jacinto mountain outside of Palm Springs. Again, I felt like I was going very slow and felt my knees and hips a little bit. We had a lot of incline to do and another 11 miles if hiking in the morning to get to our next water source. We took a long break in the middle and I ate around 950 calories of peanut butter very happily. Once we started up again, the ascent was terrible. I felt extremely tired and hot with very little water left. I knew I had to just push on and eventually I’d be there. There were down trees everywhere that we had to go over and again I was surprised that some people who may be less experienced hikers would be alright on this terrain. We finally made it to the water source and I gulped on fresh, cold water. Glowstick and Flo also we’re ecstatic to see their first snow of the trip and dropped their packs to run to it at their first sighting. At lunch, I couldn’t stop eating a peanut butter chip trail mix that I got and had melted together into a resemblance of a turd from all the heat. This did not make the sloppy mess that I had to eat with a spoon any less delicious and satisfying. From there, I took an alternate route which ended up skipping a lot of useless elevation and came in clutch to.help my body feel good by the time I had my final ascent. I beat Flo and Swell to their campsite and waited to do yoga with them. We got one other girl we had met, Brittany, to join us and had an awesome stretch. I hiked another easy two miles to my campsite and watched a beautiful, but hazy sunset with Evan, who lived in Steamboat, on top of some boulders. I’m ready for some more uphill and a whole lot of downhill to get to the holy grail of town meals on Wednesday – CHIPOTLE!!