CDT13
7th May Sunday
22 miles
Started out the usual time of 7:15, Ken was ahead of me as he seems to be more organised in setting up and packing his gear away. Maybe it’s because of his military training in the past. His habits seem to be contagious as I’m now making it top priority to set up tent, blow up the mattress and have the sleeping bag laid out before thinking of food.
Many river crossing again today, the thing we needed to watch out for was the slippery rocks that are usually covered with green algae. The worst were the rocks that were like large tiles and just as smooth.
Along the way we saw what we thought was a shortcut which went up and over a hill to meet the river again bypassing many river crossing. However, we climbed only to find out the the trail went no where and in fact it just disappeared. This cost us about an hour.
If that wasn’t enough, we blindly followed the wrong river up a valley and didn’t realise this until we had walked a couple of miles.
We got back on track and made our way to Snow Lake that really wasn’t much to look at. There was a family fishing, mum, dad, their two kids and granddad. I’m not sure if there was much in the lake it just looked like a milky water and I’d think the fish would have difficulty is seeing the hooks on the fishing lines.
It’s been a long day, finally found a place to pitch our tents, there wasn’t much in the way of decent camp site about that provided shelter from the winds. Where we camped was next to a pond, sounds great but basically is a water hole for livestock and going by what they left behind, it was cattle.
I tried to light a fire to save gas but I didn’t have enough dry leaves to get the fire going so to save gas I had a cold dinner but a hot cappuccino. A treat we like to have after a long days walking and today we finished at 8pm. That’s over 12 hours walking.