As predicted, I can’t sleep – I wake up at midnight again, feeling refreshed and ready to move, get it over with. And from what I can hear of the rest of the camp, I’m not alone; everyone seems to be restless, the night is full of rustling tossing turning creaking cracking tents bags air mattress. The cacophony’s hard to ignore, punctuated only by four-leggers galloping through a couple of times around 2 or 3am. My brain isn’t being helpful either: is it Canada time yet? No, go back to sleep. What about now, Canada time now? No, it’s still only 4am. We still have 23 miles to make tomorrow today, and we need our rest. Continue reading →

It’s so cold in the morning that I have a hard time moving, joints screeching in protest against the temperature. It doesn’t help that my alarm keeps malfunctioning – it goes off, then I move my phone to check the screen, and the alarm turns itself off. I feel like I should have to try harder to sleep in. But everyone else is rustling around, and it serves the purpose of an alarm – I get to rustling, too.  Continue reading →

It’s been about two weeks of weird anxiety of an evening – thinking I’m gonna go to sleep and then something’s gonna happen in the middle of the night. A grizzly is gonna slash into my tent and eat me, or I’m gonna get hypothermia in my -3F bag, or a coyote is gonna tear my face off as I get up to pee – whatever it is, it means I’m not gonna finish my hike. And whatever form it takes, I’m super over it. Luckily, I wake up feeling super refreshed– although it is midnight, so I don’t know that I’m gonna get that far right now. Oh well. Continue reading →

In the middle of the night, the boys all come home, chuckling cackling howling whooping. I’m affectionately annoyed; “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run”¹ and all that, but also I was trying to sleep. I knew it was coming, it was one of the reasons I stayed up as late as I already did, but alas. Here I am. Awake, with a loud sleeping pad². The next thing I know, though, my alarm’s going off and it’s around 5:50. Well then. Good morning, I suppose. Continue reading →

I’m up early this morning, but there’s literally no rush; the bus to Stehekin isn’t supposed to arrive until 9:15, from what I can tell, although it leaves Stehekin Landing at 8:15. So I get comfy on my sleeping pad, look at maps, plan out the next four days. Even with the lower mileage of the past section, it looks like it’s only going to be four more days on trail. Wow. All this time, and I’m down to four more days. Better make the best of it.  Continue reading →