By the end of the hike last night, my right knee was hurting. Today I pull out my knee brace and pop an ibuprofen. I'm also getting blisters on the top of my left foot just below the big toe. That's weird; I've never seen blisters there before.
The hiking today is easy, half on the shaded forest road and a half on the maintained South Fork Trinity River National Recreation Trail. Water is frequent, so our packs are light. I'm getting my hiking legs, though WILDCAT still slows down on the climbs. Curiously, the South Fork Trinity River Trail stays up above the river. We can see some inviting swimming holes, but they are not accessible due to rocky cliffs or private property. We are stuck on the hot trail looking down.
When Michael Kauffmann created the Bigfoot Trail, he wanted hikers to experience the diversity of conifers along the trail. Over the past few days, I've enjoyed watching for and identifying various trees as the ecozones change. I have copies of Michael's tree identification pages on my phone and a little cheat-sheet in my pocket. I used to know many of these trees (I was a teaching assistant for a field ecology class in college), but my memory is weak. I joke that I like having a bad memory because every time I relearn something, it is fresh and exciting!
We need 28 miles between today and tomorrow, so we hike 15 today. We stop where Smokey Creek flows into the South Fork Trinity River and discover an amazing swimming hole in the creek with water over my head for perhaps fifty feet, so I get to swim a little, though the cold quickly persuades me to hop out. It feels so refreshing to get clean and rinse out my clothes!
15 miles to Smokey Creek, to mile 46.
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