After a great nights sleep in the Yellow House we headed over to Rivera to enjoy one last fantastic breakfast put on by Emi. Dans friends are in for breakfast while Dan himself is driving Tim to Jackson to fly home. Gabe is there and we confirm that it was him hanging out the fire truck window last night. 

Emi’s friends Garry and Jo, who are going to give us a lift to the trailhead, arrive and join the rest of the crowd around the communal table for breakfast. The Rivera is a hard place to leave. 

After saying our goodbyes we head to the Green Rive Lake trailhead and spend a nice hour chatting with Jo and Garry on the way. They are a very interesting couple and we have a lot of things in common. They spent a lot of years packing Llamas into the forests around the Winds and also have done some cycle touring. They hosted three siblings from an Italian family as exchange students over the last 5 years and are off to Italy in a couple of weeks to tour around with them. 

When we get back on the trail it could not have been better. We were both beaten around by the days hiking in the Southern Winds and in particular the mosquitoes drove us crazy. We could not face another couple of weeks of that or even another couple of days. So when we started hiking this morning with only a few mosquitoes but nowhere near the black mass that surrounded us before, we both breathed a sigh of relief. 

The hike out of the lake climbed for the first part up to Gunsight Pass. As usual on this trail, the views in all directions were spectacular. We were again treated to fields of wild flowers amongst the green grass. Another very welcome but unusual thing for our trail was a bridge to cross the first stream we came to. After spending lots of time wading through freezing water  or balancing on logs to find a bridge brings a very simple joy to the day. 

They day was cold and by the time we stopped for lunch at the top of Gunsight Pass it was starting to cloud over. The afternoon was spent walking down from the pass and across various wide open parks with intermittent light showers. 

We started a new book in the afternoon, Bryce Courtney’s The Potato Factory. We have really enjoyed his last couple of books and just love the narrator Humphrey Bower. 

We decided to camp on a open rise for the night hoping the breeze will keep any mosquitoes at bay. It is a spot that has been well used by car campers and I am sure over the long weekend would have been full. As I set up the tent Yeti starts the dinner and lights a fire in the fire ring. We don’t have to go far for fuel for the fire as the car campers have left the ground covered in wood chips and broken branches. 

We have been using the Ley maps for this section but had a slight problem with them today. The gut Hooks route and the Ley Route were almost identical through this section but on the Ley map he has the distance we covered today as 13 miles while from Gut hooks it has us at almost 17 miles. Of course we would prefer to believe the gut hooks distance. 

We have been hanging our food each night and today at this established camp site it is made easier by a cross beam tied between two trees. It is not the recommended 100 yards from our tent but is at least down wind.