Day 6 – 9/30/19
27 miles / 117.2 total

A quick update about Bubs: She is doing well, though still feeling a bit off, several days after leaving us at Leslie Gulch. She’s planning to spend some time hiking (with packraft!) along the much cooler Oregon Coast Trail. Hopefully the temps out here will drop, she will feel 100% again and be able to rejoin us at some point.

We resisted the urge to sleep in and have breakfast before leaving, wanting to get an early start on this stretch leaving town to get some miles in during the cooler hours. With 6 days of food and anticipating up to 40 waterless miles (without detouring down a side canyon to the Owyhee at 20 or 30 mi in), our packs were so. damn. heavy.

We planned on taking enough water for 30 miles and doing the detour down to the Owyhee for more, but also hoping to find a source before then and not actually have to go down. I took 10L, and after half a mile, decided screw this nonsense, and dumped 1 liter. It made me feel better.

Our ODT theme song is “Cows Around” by Corb Lund (thanks Marmot!). And today, there were plenty of cows around. We came across several good cow troughs, topped up to 9L again at ~10mi in, which set us up with enough water to not have to detour down the canyon for water.

It was a long hot day in the upper 90s again. We took an almost 2hr long break late afternoon when we finally found a tiny bit of shade from a small rocky wall at the top of Solider Canyon.

We camped at a BLM canyon overlook for the night, just off a nicely maintained gravel road with absolutely zero traffic.  It’s Friday of Labor Day weekend, shouldn’t people be out??