July 2
Mileage 28
1,112 miles hiked

It’s forty degrees when I wake up next to the lake. Forty degrees! Now I wish I hadn’t sent my stove away. I shiver in my sleeping bag, which is damp from condensation, as I eat my cold granola in protein powder milk. No hot tea for me! Oh well.

Everything is fine again, though, once the sun comes up over the granite peaks. The day warms until it’s almost, but not quite, too warm. The elevation profile today looks like this- round a sparkling lake. Climb through the damp flowery forest, up into alpine meadow, and over a pass. Descend down the other side of the pass. Cutaway pass. Rainbow pass. Goat flat. Two others without names. Climbing no longer feels as hard as it did in Glacier- I cruise right along. Montana has made me strong.

We’re in the Anaconda-Pintler wilderness. There’s water everywhere. This water tastes like snowmelt. Springs run out of the bottoms of trees. We take long breaks. I finish my audiobook- All the Light We Cannot See, about a German boy in the nazi army and a blind girl in France. The book has been fantastic. It just won the pulitzer prize for fiction!

My puncture wound is doing well. Twice a day I put some hand sanitizer on it, then some neosporin, and change the band-aid. It doesn’t seem to be infected.

I’m still dizzy. What gives.

Camp is at another wonderful lake, the water glassy and broad, the light long. I’m so tired, coated in cold sweat and cooked from the sun. I eat all sorts of random things for dinner and brush my teeth. Time for sleep.

Photos on instagram