Mileage: 14.8 km

Today was a nice and easy day. Thankfully!

Toothless slept in quite late this morning. He woke at 7:30am instead of his usual 5:30-6:00am window. Normally this late of a sleep in would stress me backpacking but we hike on his schedule and we planned most days to be relatively short to account for stuff like this. And it helped us avoid the rain and sleep in a bit more ourselves.

We did camp chores and after encountering a deer that wouldn’t move over on the trail connecting our campsite and the outhouse we got moving ahead. We started hiking at just after 9:00am. Laaate start. But it doesn’t touch our record breaking noon start on the SCT.

Despite the late start today and how slow we were to break camp, we are starting to settle into a routine in the mornings which is really helpful. There is less mental energy being spent doing our chores.

Natasha started carrying Toothless for the day. It was slow going through the burn and improved once we started descending towards Twin Lakes. We had made great time so far – achieving about 3km/hr which is a pretty solid pace for Natasha and I in general.

We gave Toothless a wiggle break at Twin Lakes and swapped so I would carry him.

The hike up Sage Pass was solid. I felt great and we made great time. This is roughly where we connected to the official GDT in 2018 so almost everything after this has been hiked before by us. The burn is a little more green and cool than it was in 2018, but not much. We made the same navigation mistake and lost the trail at a hairpin turn, right after I thought to myself “the trail does something funny around here. We should be careful not to lose it”. We caught on immediately and only had to backtrack about 20 feet.

The ridge walk was amazing. Toothless slept for much of the first part of it until we bumped into Lowell, Jeanette and Bill. It was windy and so we pulled out his down cover and that kept him from waking up from the wind.

We took over their lunch spot and stopped for lunch.

Toothless was awake for the rest of the ridge walk. He was having a pretty good time. The views were amazing and I am so pleased to revisit them because they weren’t at the front of my memory until we did it again. I love the views and the fun gully that gives me Sci Fi vibes.

We encountered a goat on the ridge that wouldn’t get off the trail. It kept walking ahead of us, not particularly concerned but not giving us room to safely go around. Eventually the ridge and trail diverged so we lost it as it followed the ridge and we kept on trail.

We made it to camp at Font Creek at 3:30pm. This was an early finish so Toothless got a lot of wiggle time. We also tried to eat dinner at a normal time but he was too excited to focus on eating. He went to sleep at a more normal time (7-7:30pm) and so far seems to be sleeping well.