Day Fourteen ~ Thursday, May 9

Bright and early start to the day! Breakfast was ready for us at 7. I was Leader of the Day (LoD) and so got up around 6:30. I was very anxious for the day. Slowly we headed down to breakfast, some of us eating a little early to the 7:30 breakfast time. In the following hour, I met with Hollis to learn about the plan for the navigators and chefs, I met with the navigators and looked over the handy 3D map to show them the valley we had to enter and then walk along side for the day. I also met with the chefs to divide lunch and prepare for dinner.
By 8:30 all this had happened, and people were getting close to being fully packed up. We left a little late at 8:45 a.m. The navigators had a little difficulty getting us out of town which was completely understandable as we had no idea what the signs looked like, and we had to negotiate construction and landslide trail damage (something we would see quite a bit of over the day).
Eventually we made it to the valley and started our initial descent. The weather was actually pretty nice. Partly cloudy, but a lot of sun. Percentage of rain went up to 40% by 1 p.m.
As a leader, I noticed one primary problem plagued our group, and that was we didn’t have much group awareness. It was the same thing that happened to our Philmont group. We had faster hikers and slower hikers and the two groups had trouble communicating, resulting in what we call the “caterpillar effect”. The thing I grew most doubtful about was how much should I remind the group to slow down before it was too much. We stopped for lunch about noon and enjoyed some OP sandwiches.
We hit the road again by 1 p.m., and it looked like the sun might hold for a while. Ultimately we had about 3 more travel hours, including hiking and breaks. We made it to Le Dolent, our Chalet, by 4, which was right as the rain started coming in.
We were all ready to pass out, but we had more sandwiches for dinner, and then an evening meeting. My go around question was to have people think about why they came on this trip. My reasoning was because now we’re heading into the part of the trip where people may start to question why they signed up for the trip, and so I wanted to remind them why.
I was very fortunate that Christina just happened to have a similar evening program. I swear, I was not instructed to have that question! Long, but successful day!

-Joseph Bruner