Surprise!

Sunday, June 12. 1:50am

What's the last thing you want when cowboy camping? Yep, rain.

I will write the day's entry later, but in summary, after hiking over 21 miles I was tired and found a campsite described as having two small spots after a three mile stretch of hiking mountainsides with no flat spots.

There were six tents already pitched...

And another guy cowboy camping. So I followed a little path past the guy in his sleeping bag and set up for the night, figuring that I would do without the tent since it didn't look like there was room for my tent, plus, when has it rained recently?

Well, I woke up to rain falling on my face at about 1:30am. Not welcome.

I quickly pulled out my tent and spent a few frantic minutes putting it up in a less than ideal spot. Got lucky and it pitched looking reasonably good.

Of course as I finished putting the tent up the rain stopped.

It did thunder a couple times and the rain returned for a couple minutes, so my efforts in putting up the shelter weren't wasted.

Now to let things dry...

Fortunately most of my gear was still in my pack, and all that got wet was my clothes, which desperately need a wash anyway, and my sleeping bag and air mattress, which are drying out from my body heat.

Back to sleep, the wind sounds like it is picking up. And rain has started lightly falling again.

-Brad Wilson