May 4
Mileage 28
Mile 220.5 to mile 248.5

Heat wave/the desert can be fucking brutal. Climbing for 20 miles, from one thousand feet up to eight thousand feet. I cross paths with two angry rattlesnakes, one horny toad. I feel awful all day. Water tastes bad, I’m not really peeing, eating makes me naseous. There’s no shade and I run out of water for a few miles, get even more sick to my stomach, then I’m shitting my brains out for the rest of the day. Someone at Ziggy and the Bear’s said that after my experience with the heat and dehydration yesterday I’d feel off for a couple of days. I hope that’s it. It seems too early for anything else. I can’t keep up with anyone today, I feel too tired and mumbly to talk. I’m amazed that in spite of how I feel I manage to drag myself 28 miles over the scarred, convoluted surface of the earth. I must be some sort of masochist. At one point I sit down on a rock and cry. It’s very pretty and sitting and looking at the nature, the low light of dusk, makes me feel better. Why is everything so hard. In the end though I overshoot the boys, who stop at a haunted, mouse-filled cabin, and spread my bedroll on a beautiful ridge at 8 thousand feet among the pine trees. NotaChance, we’ll learn tomorrow, did a 33 mile day to sleep on the couch at the Onyx summit cache. We’ve taken to calling our group “NotaChance and the Pink Blazers”, as we spend our days trying desperately to keep up with her. (Pink blazing is when you try to catch a woman on the trail.) I blow up my neoair. We’ve climbed up high enough that there are pine trees again- it’s a magical trick of the desert. It’s freezing, literally freezing, but I suspect that with my neoair I’ll be cozy and warm. And I am! I lay in my bedroll, listening to the wind in the trees around me, as my body begins to relax. I’ve stretched, taken an ibuprofen. Drank my magnesium powder. My feet ache in a brutal way, my ankles, my calves, my knees. I roll over but the pain just shifts. Random pains zing across my shoulders, down my arms, through my big toes. What am I doing? I think. Maybe I should slow down. This pace is brutal. It’s been epic for me to go as fast as I have been, this soon. But at what cost? All this pain and pressure. I don’t want to lose my friends. I’m not sure if I can keep up. But I’ll do my best.

Photos on instagram.