Thursday, 15 August 2013
It was a short 60 mile stretch to Rawlins from Encampment and included a 36 mile road walk into town. We decided to night hike as much of it as possible and made a good time of it - listening to music, watching the sunset, and joking around on the empty dirt road on our first 30 mile day in some time. The next day on the paved highway walk into town we had breaks in culvert pipes underneath the road as it was the only shade possible on the whole road walk. Just like real hobos.
We ate, slept, resupplied and headed out of town the next day. 6 of us began to walk out of Rawlins along the highway and saw the last business at the edge of town. It was a movie theatre, and was enough of a distraction to get us to stop. With our packs on we walked into the theatre and stowed them at the front. The special effects and sound were a sensory overload, being deprived of such things on the trail we certainly appreciated the simple act of watching a movie.
We headed into the Great Divide Basin in the early evening - a 100 mile section of flat shadeless desert - and hiked till midnight. The next 3 days were hell on my feet. My shoes were pretty busted up after 600 or so miles so I got a cheap pair of runners to use for a couple of hundred miles until my new shoes arrived in the mail. My propensity for destroying shoes reached its full potential on this leg and after 25 or so miles I had squashed the rubber completely on the shoe and was walking on the inside of my heel. Every step was painful as my ankle twisted inwards and made fast walking impossible. This was an issue in the heat of the day as I held the other 3 of us left in the group back from doing our allotted 30 miles per day on this section. We broke up the monotany by playing alphabet and word games on the night hikes and found a bocci ball (pétanque) set in the middle of the desert that someone had kindly left at a piped spring for hikers to play.
I'm sure other things happened on this flat section of roads, but the pain blocked most of it out. I will never again hike in $30 running shoes.
Lander. Aug 10th. Mile 1500
