Miles: 22 Steps: 43,021 Vertical gain: 4,713 feet Liquid consumed: 160 oz Wildlife:chipmunks that ran alongside me for quite a while, one little cow that was totally freaked out by me (sorry buddy!), big bird of prey as I found my campsite, pronghorn. Faith in Humanity:randomly getting cell service after 3 days and seeing so much support! So awesome and appreciated! After not really seeing any trees for over a week, it was really nice to enter the Medicine Bow National Forest and enter true forest again! Of course there were easily 100 blowdowns across the trail in the forest, but that's just part of the fun! Challenging day of ups and downs. Up to the exposed, hot divide, then into the forest of blow downs and shade. Repeat repeat. Then at the end of the day the trail kept going up, well over 10,000 feet, in fact I'm camped at near 10,400 feet right now. I was exhausted and made fairly slow progress today but I still ended up doing 22 miles. I camped a tiny bit early because the trail stayed so high up ok the ridge. One thing I want to say about the Continental Divide Trail: it's exposed! You're either above or at treeline in the Winds, above literally everything all the time in the Basin, and immediately dyer you're thrown on the very tops of high ridges, all in an effort to keep the trail near or on the divide. Kind of awesome, kind of scary! I'm under 30 miles to Colorado which is kind of cool: almost conquered my first state! I didn't realize it until right before dark: but I'm camped directly next to a water source. Something was pretty irritated with me and was thrashing around. Hopefully they don't get mad at me! I do have some cell service right now which is nice! So awesome to see all the positive comments come in and even a couple donations. Everyone's support is so incredibly inspirational! Yes!!!!