This Day Was Based

Desert solitude

It was 6:30am, sunrise. Alright Rogue, its time to pull yourself together- I told myself over and over.

I'd spent the night waking up every 15 minutes to blow my nose and cough. 

At one point I couldn't sleep and tried to text my mom about how awful the antihistamines I'd just started taking had made me feel. I thought that having someone else know how awful I felt might make me feel just a tiny bit better. 

I wrote that they were one of my biggest regrets on the PCT and it'd become exhausting to eat or sleep. Despite having 3 bars of service, it wouldn't send.

Looking back, I'm glad it didn't. As with most times on the trail, things ended up working themselves out.

It was 7:45am and I finally started hiking. I decided to do the road-walk alternate because it had more water sources and was 1.5 miles shorter. There was also that possibility of someone giving me a ride part of the way...

I just really wanted to get the hell out of there and into town already. I had to blow my nose every few minutes so my face was a swollen and cracking mess, and half the time there were hundreds of gnats attacking that face.

The sun beat down on me as I walked what seemed like a never-ending desert road. I imagined if I started seeing mirages it would be of a cold shower or lake to jump in rather than drinking water.

I made it back to the trail, having just skipped 1 mile with a short ride. I could live with exchanging that one mile for my sanity.

It was lunch time at the only water source for 15 miles, so naturally there ended up being 5 of us there all at once. Myself, Swiss Miss and Chocolate Cherry, Tipsy, and Franco. 

Laughing over lunch with that many hikers finally took most of my focus off of how ill I felt. It was the illest.

I'd planned on going 10 more miles to camp by an algae-covered pool of water, but some of the hikers there pointed out there was a spring in 7 miles just 2/10ths north of the trail. Mysteriously, no one had commented on the source in the water report or any of the apps since August, so I'd figured it was just dry.

When I got a glance of Landers Spring I immediately walked back up the road to make an "H2O -->" sign on the ground with sticks, so that others PCTers would know to go there.

It was freaking glorious.

We had finally reentered a place of pine trees and the temperature was suddenly perfect under their moderate shading. The spring flowed quickly and was some of the cleanest, best-tasting water I've had on the trail. There was so much water that I decided to wash myself and all of my clothes. 

I stood naked and clean in the sun, next to a group of smaller cows, looking at the spring with ecstasy.

What a drastic change from just this morning! I went from being pushed to my limit, wanting to quit, to being absolutely stoked on the trail again.

Franco decided to camp here as well so I decided to make a fire in celebration of being somewhere with bigger trees again. He, a rather sloth-like fellow, remained in his tent the whole time but we still chatted as I cooked and warmed myself by the ring.

He shares my love of Amy's mac n cheese. I came back from rehanging my clean clothes and he proudly proclaimed, "this mac n cheese is based." 

I instantly replied, "How old are you!?" He was 18. Made sense haha.

Like his mac n cheese, my day was based.