Day 37 and 38-24 hour walk

Today I hung around walker pass deep into the third day I had been there. This culture that exists on the trail is just so amazing it makes you want to immerse yourself in it. Then about midday (because I knew I would be leaving today) I thought of a way to challenge myself. I was going to walk the 50 miles from walker pass to kennedy meadows in 24 hours (actually 50.5 if you want to be exact). The hardest part was actually leaving walker pass because such great people kept showing up. In the end I left about 9 at night, after finally forcing myself to leave all the people at walker that I had not seen in a while. I began to walk. It got real dark quick and the moon was not up until deep into the night. I was walking by head lamp, but I was walking real quick. After about 5 hours of walking I took my first two hour nap. I figured in the end the sleep would help me more than it would hurt my attempt. I woke up, packed my stuff up real quick and began walking again. This time I had to pull out the jolly ranchers to suck on in order to keep my concentration in the real early morning. But at the same time as being a bit tough, it was a nice time to walk. The temperature was cool, the stars and moon were bright, and my legs and feet felt good. Before I knew it, I already had 20 miles down. The simple fact of still having 30 to go at around 7 in the morning made the task seem pretty daunting. But I just kept walking. Somewhere in the section I took my second and much needed nap. This one was nearly three hours. I woke up and then it was all business. I saw Ryan who I had met earlier and hiked with and we hiked probably over ten miles together. He then decided to stop at the small creek just before we got to the kern river and about 8 miles from Kennedy meadows. I was so close that I figured I could not stop now and should just try to push on. So I did. I flew through the first half of the eight miles with excellent views of the distant sierras, then it began to get dark. I began to drag, my feet began to hurt, my legs were cramping up, but there was no way with my competitive nature that I could quit four miles short of my goal. So through the aches and pains of my body I walked that last eight miles. I finally made it to the road to kennedy meadows and dropped. I needed to sleep. It was only a half mile walk down the road to the tiny town but I had no more miles in me. I had made it! I would go into town for breakfest the next morning. Sometime during this long day of hiking one of the bars on my pack had snapped clean in half, creating a pretty big problem going into the sierras. I noticed this after I had begun feeling some unusual pain, stabbing into my back, hopefully it is fixable at least until I can figure something else out. After this long day of walking I have two days to recover before our excellent group is off into the Sierras. 702.2 miles done and I still enjoy it!