A long day to Pueblano

From Journal -

This had to be the worst day of our trek! Josh and I had to get down to help cook the chuck wagon breakfast by 6am. It seemed to have rained overnight since our tents were soaked and sand was stuck to everything. Our clothes that we had washed and hung out were soaked.

At least we had a hot cooked breakfast of pancakes and sausage. I was so proud to see that the boys made it to breakfast on time. However, they didn't look too happy. I heard there was alot of talking back and our crew leader was very frustrated. It was a good opportunity for a crew discussion

After breakfast we needed to pick up our food and burro. We messed up and picked up the food first, so we missed the burro instruction completely. We had to wait for all of the other crews to leave before we could get set up.

It took while for us to get our burro and all the equipment seemed to be messed up. We however got everything in line to go. A couple of the boys shoveled up the corral for some cookies.

We hit the trail after having lunch at 12:30. The burro took quite a bit of coaxing and we were going quite slowly. We had a nice break in a beautiful meadow where Greg shared a devotional.

We had quite a few stream crossings and one scout chose not to wear his waterproof boots so his feet were wet.

We hiked 3.7 miles before our crew leader discovered we were on the completely wrong trail! We had to go all the way back to Ponil to get on the correct trail.

The boys were a bit more motivated as was Juanito (our burro) and we covered the first mile back in 18 minutes. However there were a couple of boys that were very discouraged or in pain so were moving slowly while several boys charged on. We got separated.

We all got back to Ponil where we took care of our feet, catered up and had about a 45 minutes break. We started out on the correct road again at about 4:30 pm.

The hiking was steady and we were able to make it into Pueblano at 7 pm. The boys were elated to see Chase (our guide). He asked "what took you so long?" Our crew leader did a very good job along the way to motivate the boys We were all very pleased that we were given a very close campsite (finally).

We still had to set up camp and put the burro up for the night. There was a bit of a mess up with the bear rope according to the boys. The tarp set up went smoothly and we did an assembly line for dinner prep. This was actually the best way to cook dinner and we would use it from now on.

We did our Roses-Thorns-Buds during the re-hydration, and even said grace before our meal. The food was much better when it was fully hydrated.

The clean up went smoothly and we all got to bed by about 9:30 pm. It will be a good night's sleet since we won't get up until 7 am in the morning!

The boys are starting to come together as a crew.