March 20th - Day 19

Leaving a town in the morning to get back on the trail is always a little tricky. It's not easy to hitch hike to the trail head and if the motel doesn't have a hiker shuttle you have to get a taxi. We had people leaving in waves because some of the group had to get gear at the outfitter that opened at 10:00. Nickelodeon, Candyman, myself, and an older thru hiker split a cab and left around 9:30. The hike we planned was going to be a chill 15.6 mile day to Tricorner shelter. As we all slept in our warm, comfortable beds at the hotel, the weather was getting colder on the trail. The trail was covered in a hard snow that turned to ice, it was basically all ice. The cool thing about today was all morning there were helicopters flying with huge lines on them dropping cargo to places. The chopper flew over my head many times but I couldn't get a picture. As I got to the first shelter (only 6 miles in) to take a break there were some Rangers and a few Ridge Runners there telling us we had to leave in a couple minutes because the shelter was having the copter drop in some kind of package. I didn't ask what kind of package but I assume it was tools or something like that. I didn't stick around because this older volunteer was going to make me back track about .3 miles down the way I came if I wanted to watch it and I thought, screw that I'm going north. I didn't think too much about it until about 20 minutes later when I found myself hiking up along a ridge that had a cool view of the helicopter lowering these crates to the shelter. It was pretty impressive. Other than that the day was pretty normal. The weather was good and the terrain wasn't too tough. When I got to the shelter the temperature began to drop pretty quickly. As I was cozy in my sleeping bag once the sun went down I went out to pee before bed and saw it was snowing pretty hard, and sticking. I thought oh great tomorrow's going to be fun!