Day 3 – 8/27/19
23 miles / 56.4 miles total
We finished up the thankfully uneventful lakeshore walking and headed up a canyon, taking advantage of meandering cow trails much of the way.
At the top of the canyon we reached a spring piped into a trough and filled up for 24 miles: 8L each. Oof.
There was a few more miles of cross country through cheatgrass hell with all the pokies. Then it was a serious of jeep roads connecting nasty muddy cow ponds (let’s pretend it’s just mud), and some slightly less nasty tires of water, making us glad we’d carried enough from the spring.
The highlight of the day, and perhaps even the entire leg was our magical happening upon a duck blind right at lunch time. I didn’t even know what a duck blind was until Dan explained it to me. It’s like a tent that you hide in the shoot ducks from. Just enough room inside the opaque walls for the two of us to cram, complete with a camp chair we took turns sitting in, and an empty bottle of Gentleman’s Jack. I was also thrilled to slice up and eat the cucumber Juanita insisted we take with us, mostly to get it the hell out of my loaded pack.
Hours of trudging along jeep roads, listening to This American Life to end the day.
The Cheatgrass does look like Hell to me.
I’m still picking the pokies out of my socks!
Did you learn about the Vale Project? One of BLM’s less great ideas in the 60’s to chain large portions of eastern Oregon as a “range improvement” Hence the invasive species.