Walked with the whole crew to Red's Meadow this morning. I told Spoonman he could cut the Darien Gap article out of the New Yorker if he wanted. I told him to take the Mars article too. When he got there the pages were all stuck together (due to food). "man...the pages are all stuck together, really Craig?"

"I told you it was a good article", I quipped..

Went to get B*Rad's phone number since they were heading into Mammoth. "Is that with a dash or a star?", I said. (B*Rad or B*Rad)

He said it was with a dash, but really liked the star naming convention.

Got to Red's Meadow and burned up a good 5.5 hours there, charging up things and sending out blog updates. The woman who worked at the restaurant was really nice. Spoonman and all of them left to Mammoth.

A few more hikers trickled in and out. The beer was a trickle also because of its price. ($4.00 for a 24oz PBR)

The hiker (Kevin) whose sandal I saved the other day showed up. For the next few hours, he kept seeing me and would say "I thought you left?!"

"Nope, still working on the website", was my reply. I finally made it out of there around 1:30pm.

It was a pretty fast hike since it was mostly flat. I came around the corner and Drama was sitting there. Ran into Beads later on (whom I met at VVR). All of us leapfrogged each other over the next few miles.

We crossed the Middle Fork of the San Jacinto River and met a couple, Joe and Gina from Los Angeles. They were at that spot celebrating the 40th anniversary of their engagement. They told me how when they got engaged there in 1973, a PCT hiker came by and kept wanting to talk. So 40 years later here they were again talking to more dirty PCT hikers.

Gina asked for my website URL and I said "l-u-n-k-y dot com". As she typed it into the iPhone, it auto-corrected to "kinky.com". We laughed about that. (on a side note, when I just tried typing in 'kinky.com', my phone auto-corrected it to 'lunky.com')

I was going to stop and cook an early dinner but the mosquitoes were horrible. The trail climbed out of the valley. I'm glad I kept on walking because soon I saw this overlook that I had forgotten about. From the overlook you can see this lake that is kind of just tucked in behind two cliffs on the other side of the valley. Drama was there and we had dinner together. He said he had been in a dilemma about getting a Jetboil stove but saw how fast I had dinner and now was going to get one.

Did a bunch of planning math while I walked, trying to figure out how many days I have to get to Truckee. Cora, Ms. Freddie, and my friend Chris are all coming down for my 40th birthday on July 2nd. Looks like I have about 9-10 days to do 215 miles.

I hiked into the darkness...and cold! It was really windy but I stopped a couple of times to take some night photos. The word "Bivouac" was stuck in my head, so then Jawbreaker's song "Boxcar" ended up running through my mind.

At one point my hands got super cold so I thought "I will just put my hands in my pockets...I should do that more often....I don't because I have my trekking poles in my hands....where are my trekking poles? ARGH!" I only had to do a walk of shame for about 1/8th of a mile. I was kind of wondering though if it was still a walk of shame if nobody noticed.

Found a bit of a sheltered spot just off the trail and made camp. Still have 21 miles or so to get to TM, but the trail is mostly downhill/flat so I should be able to make it to the PO before they close.