Day 10 – 9/3/19

21 miles / 198 total

Knowing we only had 21 miles into McDermitt made us pretty excited, especially since half those miles were marked as some sort of road, mostly primitive, making for quick travel. But as we all know, a dashed line indicating a road on a map doesn’t always mean it really exists in the present.

But we still had fairly easy travel and made good time, getting into town in time before the Post Office closed at 3:30 so we could grab our resupply boxes.

Yesterday just before exiting the canyon, I discovered I’d lost my water filter sometime that morning. Having no idea when/where, we didn’t bother going back to look for that needle in the thorny haystack. It probably came out during one of the swims. This left us with just Dan’s filter, which had clogged up to a flow rate of about 10 minutes per liter. (We were both using Katadyn BeFree filters for this trip. Bubs has had good experience with hers the last two summers, but she never used it in cow water. Basically, the suck. )

So, this is still sorta ok if you’re just sucking on it as you go, but totally a pain in the ass when you’re trying to share a filter. We inReach messaged my friends back in Portland who are housesitting for us and asked them to overnight us our backups to McDermitt. But yesterday was a holiday, so they couldn’t mail them until today, and thanks to McDermitt being in the middle of nowhere, the USPS won’t do overnight delivery, just 2 day at best. So, we may be stuck in McDermitt for a while.

Tired and hungry, we immediately hit up the Snack Stop, one of those order outside at the window burgers and ice cream kinda places. I ordered and paid for a root beer float. Turns out they were out of both root beer and vanilla ice cream. So I had a Pepsi and strawberry ice cream float. This anecdote is a pretty good representation of all our experiences in McDermitt.

The Diamond A motel is an experience every ODT hiker should have. Just after scolding Dan for sitting on top of the comforter naked (you know they don’t wash those things regularly), I pulled back the sheets to discover stains rivaling the towels in Rome.