In the morning I fry up some strawberry pancakes. If you think the ziplock bag partially covered by the water purifier bag contains a cube of butter, you are correct! We may work hard, but we eat like kings.

This view gives you a better look at our first campsite. At this point Dawg didn't know it, but there would be at least one pancake each morning we couldn't eat. It was also obvious by now that unlike prior trips where Dawg ate less than normal, he was eating more than I had budgeted. You can imagine his surprise on our first morning, when he was offered the extra pancake. Here the interchangeable food helped out. I added powdered eggs, milk and freeze dried strawberries to the pancake mix only. These additions increased the calories and protein in our breakfast and are all ok for dogs.

With our gear repacked, we head down the valley to get below 10k and eventually camp at "Camp 2" that you saw on the video overview.

Anyone who has watched my 8 part video series on backpacking knows I plead with the Millennial wanker generation not to rely on electronic gizmos. If you are not comfortable navigating with a map and compass, you have no business doing this stuff. My phone, which we use as a GPS, tracker, and extra map, is no longer working. All efforts to get it to boot fail. I have 5 batteries for it and it is clearly not a dead battery problem. Having given up on it, we no longer have an electronic crutch which means - absolutely zero. Andra was hoping I'd be able to track our total hiking mileage, but other than that, the failed phone is of no concern.