Brian’s Microblog

July 08, 2026

It rained from 4:30 to 5:00 in the morning. We fell back to sleep and didn’t get up until 6:45. Overall we slept fairly well - wearing our parkas to bed kept us warm enough.

We had to do laundry and filter water before we could get going, and we made a fruit crisp (Chef Corso recipe) for breakfast. We finally got on the trail at 10:00.

Our camp was on a ridge that made one of three sides of a big valley. We were fairly high on the ridge but the trail made its way down to the other side of the valley. That east side of the valley turned out to be somewhat rough. Some of it was like a steep-sloped bog, and then there were other areas of rock jumble. It looked like an easy, gradual descent on the map, but it was not easy hiking. Eventually this valley emptied out into the wide, flat bottomed, valley of Texas Creek almost 2000 feet lower.

There had been clouds moving through most of the morning, and it even sprinkled on us for a few minutes, but the sun came out in the wide valley and it felt hot. There was a tricky stream crossing that we later learned had flooded a while back. At another balance-challenging crossing we caught up with a trio of hikers who had passed by while we were putting our tent down. They weren’t very talkative. We stopped to filter some water for the climb to Cottonwood Pass and Julie soaked her feet.

The climb was steep at times and the first few miles were all in the forest - no distant views but there were a lot of pretty flowers. Eventually we climbed out of the forest into a long valley of brush with sort of boggy ground. This is the kind of place where we should see a moose, but we didn’t.

Julie thinks that the moose are teasing us. We see their scat often, and also see their hoof prints on the trail, but we never spot one. We even saw hoof prints on the trail after a rain shower, so we knew they were fresh.

We climbed over the last comically steep bit of trail to a saddle that is more or less even with Cottonwood Pass. A road runs over the pass so we had to cross the highway. We camped near a small lake that is just below the pass. This is the last place with close-to-trail camp sites in the next 16 miles.

10.9 miles 2225 feet of ascent 2029 feet of descent, over eight hours.