Day 4

Uneventful cold night. Though more comfortable sleeping in the leafs. I think even Adam, despite his grumblings wasnt as cold as he usually is.

And we're off. A repeating pattern of a short hike followed by a lecture. Though we found some bear tracks along the animal trail and that was cool figuring out who they belonged to. Mike, Laurie and Steve are a treasure trove of information and despite my annoyances with the lack of information important to me I am gaining major respect for them and their knowledge base. We spent another hour on a canyon floor looking for the final piece for our fire kit, the hand stone. Luckily for me, I had found an awesome cow bone the night before which made a perfect fit for my spindle so I spent the hour polishing it off with some sand stone.

And then we began a day of some serious hiking. We climbed out about 1000 feet out of a canyon and up some more hills. Nick, a personal trainer; Mark, a seriously in-shape 21 year old college kid; Abram, an avid rock climber, and myself, a triathlete were seriously in the front with Mike getting some really good exercise going until we realized we had left a big part of our group behind. Eddie, our resident German giant, who had done this 28 day course 8 years ago, was surprisingly falling behind, despite being out in front for the first 3 days. The lack of food for the 4th day now was clearly getting to him.

We finally made it to a lake where we again took our siesta break and some people took a dip. It was actually incredibly windy where we were and I decided against it and instead took a nap and wrote in my journal. And thats when it hit. The hunger. It was unreal. For 2 hours I fought a mental anguish of being hungry, a feeling I am usually not use to or am able to satisfy. Mike gave me a mint leaf which said it would stem my hunger feeling. It was the first thing I had in my mouth in over 80 hours now.


And then we took off again. And again we started climbing, though on an old jeep road. People were getting tired but Nick and I just marched along in the front and had a pretty good heart to heart about each others personal lives, crazy ex-girlfriends (cause that keeps the hunger away) and crazy sports stories. We had some spectacular views open up in front of us and I made myself to keep taking pictures.

So just to recap. Day 4 of not eating. Hiking for miles and miles uphill, thousands of feet up. And the sun is setting. Though we are nowhere close to seeing a good camping area nor do the instructors seem to have any intent of stopping. And so we keep going. I start singing "this is the hill that never ends." Laurie looks at me an amazement. Fiona looks at me and asks me "How in the world can you walk so fast for so long?!?!"

We wait for 30 minutes for Steve and Adam, who apparently had a muscle seizure and collapsed for a few minutes. People are pretty spent. I realize I actually feel great. I realize I could do this, without food or blankets, for another 1 or 2 days. Its actually a pretty good feeling. Its dark now. The moon comes out and is pretty bright. Steve all the sudden takes a turn into the woods by a creek and we bushwack through the dark dark dark woods for another 30 or so minutes. People are moving slow. I help a few cross over another creek. We keep going. All the sudden we come to a big clearing which is bright as day (a very very foggy day ;-) as the moon is doing some good lighting. We cross the clearing sensing something is up and finally come up a few tee pees/wiki-ups.

We stop. Steve says we're here. He said we could sleep in the wiki-ups if we wanted to and maybe we should check inside one of them, there might be "some packs in there". Sigh of relief. Blankets. Woo hoo! I climb inside the pitch black wiki up and feel around for the packs and pass them back through the opening. Everyone is happy to get theirs and the next 20-30 minutes are spent getting inside the wiki-up with our blankets and ponchos (which we used as another layer on the ground) and setting ourselves up for the night.

For some strange reason we thought fitting all 11 of us into the wiki-up would be a good idea. It was actually a terrible idea as sleeping among 11 people in pitch black makes the idea of a bathroom trip for the night, a non-starter. Bleh. Its clearly cold outside (in fact there is frost on the ground when we wake up, so it must have gotten below 30 that night) and we're at about 9,500 feet. Even Eddie, who up to now has been a loner when it came to sleeping, asks Adam and I if he could sleep with us. Which is significant as Eddie and I are the two biggest people in the group and the idea of one blanket down, two up is a plausible one, but for people of normal size. Poor Adam kind of got the short end of the stick for the rest of the night when it came to the blanket. Also, I will never forget Eddie, in his thick German accent, about 10 minutes after every one has fallen asleep all the sudden piping up with: "Oh my God! Where are the blondes?!?! I wanted blondes but instead I am sleeping next to two hairy men! This is terrible!" ... possibly the funniest moment of the entire trip!!!

But this day was very overwhelming. The hunger battle. The giant uphill hike. And now over 90 hours of no food. Crazy. I am having trouble falling asleep though because of the cold and the hard ground. Good night!