Most of us were up between 7:00 and 7:30 am. It was 63° but felt very warm, because there was no wind and the sun was on us, but it was a cool enough night that Danny actually went into his sleeping bag for the first time on a Greenshit trip. We finished breakfast of pancakes and sausage just before 9:00 am. At this time we noticed that there were bees congregating at every source of water, especially at the dishwashing area. This was reminiscent of the time Joey and I suffered immensely with bees on Steel Pass, although (hopefully) this wasn’t as bad as that. Our brave dishwasher today, Joey, managed to do the dishes despite the bees. We experimented with ways to distract them, for example by putting out decoy pans of water. The bees did congregate around the decoys, but it’s not clear whether we just attracted more bees, because we still had lots of bees around us.

We started our day hike up Lemoigne Canyon at 11:05 am. The canyon started pretty wide but quickly got narrower, down to about 15', with beautiful folding rock formations and some nice (but not steep) dry falls to climb over. At one point I saw what looked like crystalline calcium carbonate (i.e., cave) formations. At 11:52 am just after it got wider we were hearing lots of birds for some reason. At 11:56 am, 0.8 miles up the canyon, we came to a major fork. To the left, the south fork, was a mine in 2½ miles, but the book said that the canyon got wider in that direction, so we decided instead to take the right (north) fork because it has some narrows. The canyon did get pretty narrow, and spread out again about 1.1 miles and an hour later, at 1:12 pm. In this stretch there were some beautiful stands of wildflowers, including beardtongue and desert paintbrush.

At 2:22 pm, 2.9 miles into the hike, we decided it was time to turn around. The canyon was nice, easy walking, and just kept going and going, so there was nothing in particular to make us stop other than time. Morrie and Joey did scramble up a small side chute, while Bobby climbed to the top of a rock. I saw lots of plants here that reminded me of that nasty tamarisk invading the Colorado and Green River banks, but later after checking the photos, that’s not what it was. There was also a little side canyon here that Bobby seemed interested in hiking, but I thought it looked like a pretty tedious scramble, especially coming down. We spent about 15 minutes here before turning back.

At 3:23 pm, 1.4 miles on the way back, we found a spot where there was a small spring and briefly rested. Twenty minutes and 0.4 miles later, I realized I lost my hat sometime since that last water rest spot. I remembered that while walking, I took it off and looped it around my GPS clip, without realizing that it would just fall off if I unclipped the GPS to read it. We spent about 5 minutes looking for the hat in the immediate vicinity, and then Joey and I spent the next 20 minutes going all the way back to that rest area by the water looking for it, with no luck. (Upon later analysis of the photos and GPS track, I found out that I actually lost the hat in a 4.5-minute period between 3:35:28 and 3:40:10 pm, in a 480' stretch of canyon close to the spot where I realized it was lost. I could have done that analysis at the time, had I thought to look in our cameras for the time of the last picture of me with the hat.)

Giving up on my hat, we kept walking. At 4:12 pm, in another ½ mile, I came close to stepping on a rattlesnake. I was able to get a video of it as it slithered into a bush. In a few more minutes, at 4:25 pm, we were back at camp.

Around 6:00 pm, instead of battling the bees to make our margaritas we tossed the Frisbee for 20 minutes in moderate winds. Afterwards we had some chips with Trader Joe’s amazing guacamole dip containing pico de gallo, and finally followed by the margaritas. Because the bees would be attracted to any exposed liquid, we chugged the margarita mix straight out of the bottle. By 6:40 pm we started preparing dinner, and during this time we found that jar of shrimp cocktail sauce we were so desperate for the first night. For dinner we had 4 large bratwurst (fried in oil) with a can of baked beans cooked with half of a big white onion chopped, nearly half a jar of chopped jalapenos, and topped with 4 oz of shredded cheddar cheese, served open faced on sesame seed potato hamburger buns left over from last night’s dinner. Of course, no gourmet restaurant could improve on this meal.

At 7:50 pm as it was getting dark, with cigars, we started on a night hike, going south from our campsite up a straight gully (not really a canyon), with the intent to be in view of our hanging candle lantern the whole time. Soon after we started I stumbled on sharp rocks and got some pretty bad gashes on my leg, one of them rather deep and bleeding well. But we kept going and at 8:22 pm we reached a high point on a nubbin above the campsite. It had a rock on top that was topped by white stuff that could have been bird shit. We were back at the campsite at 8:40 pm, so the hike was less than an hour. My leg required massive bandaging but it didn’t hurt that much.

Then Bobby brought out what was to be one of the highlights of this trip: an LED-illuminated Frisbee. The colors pulsated and changed continuously, and it responded to force, so when the Frisbee was caught hard or hit something, it glowed red. Each person had an illuminated wrist band so we could see each other without lights, and in the pitch black we had our best Frisbee game ever. Frisbee lasted until 9:40, and after Laphroaig and chocolate we were in bed by 10:00 pm.