Day thirty-nine

The day started off cool. It had really rained the night before and I left my long sleeve shirt on. Oh, I think I lost more weight in my left breast than my right. I was laying there in the middle of the night, after getting up to pee for the third time, feeling my pelvic bones and enjoying the concavity of my tummy. I decided to check out my boobs, and it's hard to tell in this sports bra, but I think the left one is smaller. I tried to check it out again this morning but it is hard to do. I need to see a mirror.

Most of the 10 miles today was downhill, but it warmed up in a hurry and I had to stop and change my shirt. Rangely had stopped to take  picture but her phone was dead, so I let her use mine. I took lots of pictures today and I took my time. The eleven boys that have been with us stayed at the shelter, or some of them did and they passed me while I was resting. They said they needed to keep going probably all the way to Erwin because one of them is ill. I only saw one stranger on the trail, he was headed to Springer. His name is Rock Lobster and he's a teacher. He told me that he'd been heading up hill since he left the shelter, which sounded great to me. The trail went back and forth and meandered around. Crossed a couple of streams. It would have been a great hike today if my feet hadn't been screaming. I'm gonna take a nice little picture of those boots, then I'm gonna pitch them. I can't believe I could hike 200 miles with no blisters then pow! When I got to the shelter Rangely was already here but she'd waited for me to walk back down the stream. There we was JP and Stonewall and we warned them that this was the water source. I got some duct tape from them for my feet. They camped right down the hill from us and I was delighted that they started a fire. You know I love a fire. So I pulled a couple of good size logs from our fire ring and headed down the hill. It's a good thing too, because all they had was kindling. I went and got the rest of it and the two boys and I had a nice fire. The perfect end for the last night of a week of backpacking.