The LBL Hike
Day Three

A heavy dew greeted us this morning but at least the skies were still clear. We packed up the tents and gear and got started back on the trail by 8 am. A couple of miles down the trail we stopped at a picnic area to munch on some breakfast bars. There was also a glamourous stone privy that I made use of too. Hey, when you get a luxury on the trail like that you make the best of it. The toe was beginning to become more of a problem as the feeling of an ice pick being stabbed into it came to mind. That was on each downhill as the toe was jammed into the front of the boot. After about 3 miles we made another stop and I asked Steve if he, by chance, had some clippers. It turned out he did have a small pair and I used that to cut the end of the nail off. I also put a thicker dressing on the end of it for some padding. That helped a lot to relieve the pressure but it was still pretty sore but I was able to get back up to a pretty good pace and got back ahead of Steve and O.W. to do my job of catching spider webs with my face. Because of that I was given the official trail name of 'Webhead'. I'm not sure if the spiders liked it although they did seem to have fun spinning their webs off the end of my hair. Some of the webs were so strong you could have almost used them as fishing line. We finally reached the planetarium visitors center where we used one of their shelters for our lunch stop. We were able to refill our water bottles there too. Steve went inside and came back with a Coke and Mr. Pibb. It had been several years since I had had a Pibb and I happily drank it down. Then another snaffoo happened as a strap on my pack popped loose. One of the eyelets on the end had pulled apart so we had to do some surgery to fix that so we could keep going.

After getting back on the trail we came to a path through some tall thistles where the bees were working like crazy. This little buy was so busy he didn't even notice he was on Candid Camera. Several other bees were really busy as well gathering their nectar. We saw one other large field of bright yellow flowers that I expect were being fed on too. Finally at about 4 pm we made it to the Brush Arbor shelter. We had a big hill to cross over to get there but it was a nice area and there was the best water source we had seen the entire trip, a spring with water cold enough you knew it had to come from deep under the ground. It was good to have some down time earlier in the day. O.W. got a fire going to keep the skeeters down. For supper this night I decided to go with beef stew. That really hit the spot.

We also had a visit from a 6-point buck who was feeding on some of the tasties provided by all the local oak trees. He didn't even seem to notice we were there. He hung around for about 15 minutes before moving on. The coyotes didn't follow us this time but we did get to hear something else in the middle of the night. At just before 12:30 I heard a sound a few hundred yards away. About ten minutes later the sound came again and this time it was definite. I had just heard my first elk bugle. He bugled one more time before going quiet. It was something I was hoping to see but if I didn't just hearing one was pretty cool. They've got that sound that's pretty unmistakenable.