Like we agreed yesterday evening, at 7:30 me and Stefi were ready to go back on trail. Donna was so kind to give us a ride back. Ann will go with her to Etna this afternoon where she either gets more rest or continues. Her foot is still hurting so it is a little bit unclear at the moment. At 8:00am we were back on trail and well it would not be so bad – you know in those new shoes – if it wasn’t for those packs! Man they were really heavy. It’s been a while since we had to carry more than four days worth of food and this time we had food for six! We decided to skip Etna and go straight to Seiad Valley. My back definitely wasn’t happy about the weight though. Hopefully next resupply points will be closer to each other. As if the packs weren’t enough we also had to do a rather big climb in the morning. Most of it was exposed so we were sweating like crazy. I decided to listen to some music so I can distract myself a little bit.

In the end the climb wasn’t so bad. The views really made up for it. It felt like we were back in the mountains. After the climb we took a lunch break and met some others hikers there as well. It was pretty busy but some of them we have met before and they were all really nice. In the afternoon we still had around 11 miles (17.6km) left so we tried to push a bit. Well, with those packs it definitely wasn’t so easy. My left shoulder was hurting a bit so I tried to put the pack a bit more down on my hips. Every now and then we had to take a little break to get at least a little rest. Stefi’s feet were doing pretty well today and mine were quite nicely adapting to my new shoes. Just before 8pm we finally made it to our tentsite that did have water although 300 yards off trail. Better than carrying though because otherwise I probably would not survive all that heavy load. We set up our tents, enjoyed our dinner and finally crawled into our tents. Even though we only did 24 miles (37km) it felt like we did at least double. I can’t wait for Connie to get lighter again.