CDT77
10th July Monday
19 miles

Rain came down on me in the early morning while I was still in the tent, wasn’t a hard downpour but just enough to make thing difficult  while packing.

6 o clock  on the dot I was on the trail with my rain coat on walking in the slight drizzle.

This time I kept my boots on while river crossing, it wasn’t so cold with shoes and socks on.  I came across another difficult  crossing, maybe with the rain last night made the  water lever higher as it was definitely not for me to cross, from a distance I thought I could see a spot to cross downstream but it wasn’t so.  I sat there considering my options and hiking back three days to the main road, didn’t appeal to me.  So I upstream went in search for a safe crossing, it was about half an hour hike when I came to a lake where the river is derived from.  The water was much calmer unlike the flow of the river I followed, it took a couple attempts,  but I finally found a path that enabled me to cross to the other side where the water came up to the belt on my backpack, fortunately the water didn’t touch the bottom  the backpack where my sleeping bag was in a water proof bag which I didn’t want to test.

Past over three passes and all had snow at the top, the final one had snow on both sides and when coming down, the weather turned quickly and with rolling thunder and dark clouds  above.  I had no desires to be caught  in the thick of it.  It hailed, with no place to take cover and no where to camp, I put on rain gear and kept going.  The rain and hail didn’t stay for long but at 6:30 I’d had enough and with new rain hitting me again I setup the tent for the night.