Kaitlyn & the Butter Socks

The best part of this morning was closing my eyes knowing I could sleep in just a little longer since we only had 10 miles on the agenda today. When I actually got up and packed up, Light Saber was sitting in the shelter ready to go. He’d been up for quite some time, so he’d relocated to the shelter for a morning nap and to wait for my lazy self to get there.

I took a trip to the privy before heading out. I’ve decided that the privies just keep getting smaller and more poorly located. Today’s privy was definitely visible. As I was chilling there this morning I waved as Chappy walked by.

Today’s hike was so nice. Something about knowing I only had to do 10 miles made every step more enjoyable. The climb at the beginning to Bluff Mountain got the heart racing. I love reading the description on Guthook when it says something like a viewless summit. Like why?

After that climb though it was basically all downhill. In no time, the shelter came into view. I felt like we went in circles actually trying to get there, but we finally made it. I started pulling out my food to make a late lunch.

From the picnic table you could see people walking down the trail up the hill, so every time a person walked by I would yell at them and tell them they were doing a great job. Since we got to the shelter so early, we had thought about just doing the last 3 miles into Hot Springs, but people started rolling in and I decided I’d rather just hang out and only have to pay to stay 1 night.

The shelter was so fun tonight. I hadn’t laughed so hard in a hot minute. At one point, I was sitting at the picnic table and Chappy walked up and looked at me and was like, “So still Kaitlyn?” I was like, “Nah I changed it.” He looked all surprised and said, “To what?” I was like, “Sydney.” He laughed and said, “So it was never Kaitlyn?” That became the joke of the night as everyone decided they were calling me Kaitlyn until I got a trail name. Truffles started playing this game of trying to guess what name he thought we all looked like.

While we were all chilling, someone was looking up the diner in Hot Springs. They said that they had a picture of giant cinnamon rolls. Everyone was pretty excited about some cinnamon rolls so we decided we’d get up and hike down there for breakfast. When I asked what time we were getting up, someone said 5am. At first I thought they were joking, but the more everyone talked about it, they were ready to night hike in for some cinnamon rolls. My job was to wake everyone up, and if I failed, they were threatening to put full sticks of butter in their sweaty socks and hit me with them.

Since we were getting up early, we all decided we better go to sleep. I set 2 alarms because I was not about to get attacked with butter socks. I was excited for our morning adventure, especially because it involved cinnamon rolls.