We continued through Wyoming’s Wind River Range past many alpine lakes. We were hoping to do lots of swimming, but the weather ended up being cold and rainy. The views were still amazing though.
Day 89 – Mile 1799.5 – Rain delay
Today ended up being a bit of a strange day. A thunderstorm woke us up at around 4:30 am a little before our alarm. Tim went to retrieve our food bags from the trees when it let up for a bit. We decided to wait it out in our warm tent because the rain was coming down pretty heavy. We collected some rain water off the tent in order to have a third coffee while we waited. Finally at around 8:45 we started walking. It was a cloudy morning. The Winds are quite beautiful mountains. We had amazing views of alpine lakes and rocky peaks all day. We had quite a few large stream crossings but didn’t bother to take our shoes off because there were already soaked from the rain. We saw the first two southbound CDT hikers. They usually start at the Canadian border in late June or early July. We are about 1800 miles in right now, and they are about 1200 miles in. At noon it started raining again, so we put on our rain coats. We should have put on our rain pants and rain mitts as well but didn’t. We wanted to eat lunch, but there was no end in sight for the rain and it was too cold to stop walking. Finally at around 2 pm we set up our tent to eat lunch and warm up. Our shorts were soaked, and the water was working it’s way up our shirts. After a couple of hours it let up, so we started hiking again decked out in all of our rain gear this time. We called it a night at around 8:30 pm. We got our tent set up before it started raining again. Not quite the day of big miles filled with swimming we were imaging. Maybe tomorrow.
Day 90 – Mile 1827.8 – Beautiful Hiking
The rain decided to give us a break today. That was nice, because the trail took us to the highest part of the Winds we’ll reach — over 11,000 feet. These mountains are gorgeous! All morning we weaved past alpine lakes with towering granite peaks above them. Despite the remarkable views, we didn’t have to work as hard to earn them as we did in Colorado. We did some climbing, but it was pretty moderate. After we had second lunch we started a big descent down to the Green River, which has a beautiful greenish haze due to glacial runoff from the glaciers above us. The river is lined with towering peak after towering peak. It is very scenic. There is a trailhead that provides access to the area so there are lots of backpackers around. They are all nice and they’re usually pretty excited when we tell them we’re thruhiking all the way to Canada! We found an amazing campsite on a ledge above the Green River, which at the point beneath us has widened into much more of a lake than a river. For dinner we had Thai Curry. Yum! We ate it far away from our tent to make sure we don’t attract grizzly bears. -T
Day 91 – Mile 1855.5 – Out of the Winds
We started the day by following the Green River. There was fog on the water and the peaks above us were lit up by the sun. It was quite spectacular. When we started heading up away from the river, the sun finally hit our faces! It felt magnificent after two days of rain and clouds. We had some down trees to navigate. They were nothing like a few days ago, but they still slowed us down. At one point we realized we were half a mile down the wrong trail. That was sad! So we turned around and headed back to the CDT. A tree had fallen over onto a trail junction, so we didn’t see that there was a junction (ironically the fallen tree had a CDT trail blaze on it). We climbed over a pass and headed into rolling mountains with sagebrush. We had a few large stream crossings, so we just kept our shoes and socks on and walked right through them. At around 7:30 pm, we scared a herd of 10+ pronghorn and 50+ elk at the same time. It was crazy watching that many elk run together. And at camp we saw a deer. -R
