4/8 Part II

After half an hour the sun set and I was worried since it was getting dark and he had no headlight. I grabed his pack and put it on my front and hiked back for him. After a few minutes I ran into him returning with the camera. We turned around and started to cover as much ground as we could before twilight. It was maybe a mile later when we came across a post with a double white blaze, the sign for a junction. McGyver checked the back of the pole and saw a blaze there too so we headed forward. Whenever a tree or post is blazed the blaze is placed on the landmark square on so it will face you when you approach it. This is important in areas such as fields or snow where the only way to devine the trail is to look at the other side of the post and see where the trail is comming from, ie where a southbounder would se the blaze. This post was back blazed to go forward and we followed. After a while of following a good trail with no blazes we decided that turn was proably miss bla!
zed and hiked the eastimated .8 back. In the end we wasted about a half hour going 1.6 though the snow and last scraps of sun light. We put on headlights found the left turn at the mislabled post and head off. We were out of water and were "luck" enough to run into it along the way as in I sinked into soft boggy ground and soaked my feet through. Oh did I mention it was that 23 degrees! We spent about 10 minutes filling up our empty water baldders and headed on. Somehow the only my feet got cold in the break. We charged through waist high drifts towards the campsite. To make progress we often tried to walk around the deeper or uphill drifts but as a result we had to contantly search the woods for the trail. We would go from blazed tree to blazed tree and judge where the trail was by the slope and where trees and plants look disturbed. After and hour or so of this suddenly I came into a blue blaze, the color of a blaze for a side trail. I looked at my data page a found the n!
ext blue blaze trail I was exspecting was the water source for the she
lter we were looking for. We turned around and after minute of searching we found Stan Murry Shelter. If I hadn't seen the blue blaze and instead found a white blaze we would have hiked right by without even knowing it the darknees was so complete snd the snow so deep.
It was 10 PM and neither of us had eaten in hours so we efficently set up camp. I pitched my tarp in the back to help conserve some of the heat as it was already 19 degrees out. McGyver added his rainfly closing one end up to. Next we made dinner. We skipped the bear hang and I crawled into the makeshift space to eat. My shoes were frozen so I couldn't unlace them. I sliped my feet into a trash bag and into my sleeping bag to thaw which they did while I ate. I took the shoes off and left them in the bag and put it in the foot of my sleeping bag. This allowed me to, A. Put my feet up on them to keep them insulated from the cold floor, B) keep them from refreezing making them impossile to put on come morning, c) keep them from soaking my sleeping bag. After that I was exhausted and quickly fell asleep to the feeling of pain in my feet as they warmed.