The plan to keep warm last night worked fairly well. My fire cleared and dried my tent site, and for the first couple of hours it was like sleeping on a heater blanket. The precautions turned out to be unnecessary though, as the temperature remained fairly warm.
I spent the morning in search of trail. There is a ribbon of trail that is visible on the mountain slope about 3/4 of a mile from here (as the crow flies). I went cross country on the most direct route, which was over a promontory of stacked granite slabs. I found the trail, which becomes easy to follow again at that point. Unfortunately, to avoid the promontory I had climbed over, the trail bends to the east before looping back to where I found it. I tried to backtrack along the trail, but it enters a stretch of pine forest and becomes impossible to discern. Still, about half of the 1.5 miles is now blazed, and all I have to do is find a path from here to where my backtracking went awry. It shouldn't be to hard to find, but I am dreading another exhausting day of slogging through snow.
I spent the rest of my day eating, reading, and relaxing. I lost the mouthpiece to my platypus water reservoir. It's the piece that allows me to drink while hiking by biting down on it to open the flow of water. I had to make a cork out of wood so that there isn't a constant leak from the hose now.
Other than that there is not much to report, other than the fact that I am getting stir crazy with all these zero days. I feel so unproductive, which makes it harder to think that I've been out here 17 days already and am still only 180 miles from the border. I guess it is exacerbated by the fact that I am only 30 miles or so from highway 10, and probably less than 15 miles from being free of this snow. So close yet such a bitch to get there.
