Backpacking Adventure - Day three part one - Feb 27 - Mt. Lemmon Junction with WoR trail

Starting out our third day, and having resolved in my own mind that we had another alternative to adding another day to our itenerary, I felt releived that we could have a successful outcome to our backpacking outing, which I strongly wanted and think Cheryl and Dan also wanted as an outcome. It was clear that we were going to have several lessons learned from this trip. This was my first camping trip in 43 years, and Dan's first backpacking trip ever, so there should have been opportunities for learning, and there were.

We got up shortly after the sun came up over the ridge and things started to warm up. We stayed in our sleeping bags for about 13 hours, because it was quite cold out there. It was 18 degrees farenheit in the morning.

Dan and Cheryl were out there trying to get breakfast going, and I came out to see if they had everything they needed, and then was going to see what I needed to do.

Cheryl had demonstrated that she knew how to get the most out of my new jet boil stove, so everybody, including Cheryl, was surprised when we tried to put on Dan's coffee pot on my stove, and my new stove caught fire and melted down. Cheryl felt terrible, because it was her actions that caused the problem, but it was a reasonable thing to do, and she was doing the work in meal preparation, so she was the person to do what she did. Either Dan or I would have done the same thing, but I'm sure Cheryl felt bad about the whole thing, even though it was not her fault. Even though it was not Cheryl's fault, we were then in a situation where we no longer had the jet boil available to use. Not a problem for lunch, but for dinner that night and potentially breakfast the next day, it could be a problem. Cheryl had a smaller stove, so that could provide the stove capability that we need for those meals. No matter, we'd figure out what we had to figure out.

We ate our meal before the stove melted down, so at least that meal was done, even if we didn't have coffee. Dan pulled down the food from the tree, and we gathered up all of our things.

We packed up our packs and took down the tents and packed them away. One of us went ahead on the trail to find water so we could recharge our stores of water, and some pools of water were found about a quarter mile up the trail. After we were packed up, we hiked down to the water and charged up our stores of water. With our water stores recharged, we continued on the wilderness of Rocks trail with the goal of reaching the Romero creek by 5:00PM.