Sunday June 1, 28.1mi/45.2km

Trail Canyon Lake (639.3/8050ft) to Cave Spring (667.4/6160ft) (NV)

Today was a pretty easy day of hiking, and I covered a bunch of miles even with a few long breaks. I left my campsite at 6:30 and had a quick descent through the riparian brush.

Once I was below about 7,000 ft, the terrain reverted to the sagebrush landscape.

A few miles later and I left the Inyo National Forest, and was shocked to see this monstrosity of a house.

I was listening to audiobooks all morning and then the next thing I knew I had crossed highway 264, which meant I had covered 13 miles and it was only 11am. Dirt roadwalks are pretty cruiser.

It was kinda a primary dirt road, so a car would pass me every 20 minutes or so and most of them stopped to offer water. One guy from the local electric co-op even offered me all these electrolyte mixes, and some cold bottled water.

All my water was kind of hot, so it really was quite a treat. Just like yesterday, around midday the clouds started to gather and get dark and rumbly.

I quickly hiked past a rapidly building thundercloud, and made it to Fish Lake Hot Springs in the early afternoon.

It was a nice little constructed tub and I had a good long soak in the perfectly hot water. The tub drained into a couple of ponds, so the first pond was warm water and the second pond was cool water.

After an hour, I noticed a couple of tanker trucks had pulled up and were pumping water out of the pond.

Not sure if that’s legal or if they had a permit, but the guy was interesting to talk to and said it takes about 18 minutes to fill his 2,000 gallon truck, which he’ll then drive to the local mine and spray down the roads for dust control. He seemed concerned that I was drinking the water, because apparently it’s full of parasites, but my water filter is supposed to remove most biological contaminants. The next round of thunderclouds was moving in so I decided to hike on, initially on a brief XC segment.

And then the rest of the day was on a dirt road.

It was a relief to hike out of the wide open plain and back into the mountains, where I was no longer the highest point under a thundercloud.

At the end of the day I came to Cave Spring, which after much searching, I determined to be dry.

Both of the troughs were dry, and neither of the blue handled spigots worked either. I traced various pipes and tubing lines uphill, and found the source of the water inside of a cliff. But it was dry.

There is another spring in 1.5 miles that I’ll hit tomorrow morning so I’m not too concerned. I headed back down the hill and explored the little cabin that was nearby.

It looked like it had been recently fixed up inside, with a fresh coat of paint on the walls and a nice wooden ceiling. The cabinet even had a bunch of spices and water bottles.

I decided to set up my tent at a flat spot a couple hundred feet from the cabin, which should be far enough that no mice are tempted to come over here. At the end of the day the sun broke out of the clouds, and there was a neat lighting contrast between the dark sky to the East and the lighted cliff.

And a few minutes later a rainbow came out!

Watching the sunset made me realize how huge the terrain is out here.

Most of Nevada is so remote!