During the night there was quite a bit of animal activity. I’m not sure if it was deer, mice, lizards or bears but it was pretty loud. I put in some ear plugs and went to sleep. When I woke up I found out that the guy in the tent next to me woke up to a mouse in his tent. How’d it get there? Two new holes in his bug netting.
After that, it was time for breakfast. The Burney Mountain Guest Ranch is essentially a woman’s home where she takes care of hikers. She serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There is also a general store. Everything is based on the honor system. You write up your own bill and settle up before you leave. It seems to be working for her, the place was pretty busy with hikers.
The plan was to get some really big miles in today, but then we entered the hiker vortex. These hiker ranches are hard to leave and while we managed to get out earlier than the last few days, it still wasn’t ideal. Breakfast wasn’t the only vortex of the day though.
The next stop was Burney Falls State Park. They have a general store with hot dogs and drinks. We stopped in not just for the food, but the falls. They’re pretty spectacular.
In the park I met a couple hikers that started on the same day as me. I hadn’t seen one of them since the first day and I had heard he quit hiking on day two because of a knee injury. Turns out that was true and he had just decided to get back on trail. It’s really crazy how I can meet up with so many people I never thought I would see again.
So, after some sightseeing and eating, t was a bit later than I wanted, so I started hiking. It was hot out again and we had a large climb. When I finally came to water, it was actually deep enough to get in. It was almost like a hot spring pool, just really cold. It felt amazing and we spent even more time sitting there.
Around 6 pm, we took another break and tried to decide where to camp. We really wanted to get over 30 miles today but we were pretty much out of daylight. That didn’t stop us last night!
We had about 8 miles to go and finished around 9:15. I did the last mile or so by headlamp and camped near a spring. There are a ton of tents here. We had heard that 20 people stayed at the guest ranch last night, but we didn’t see any today. Looks like we found them.