Got up at 5am and set off at about 6 to try to avoid that desert heat, gets damn hot around 8am though. We saw a couple of deer on the trail! They just bounded off down this near sheer cliff face to the valley below, amazing to watch how deftly they navigated the slope. made it to a water cache around 11am and just dived under shade, some girls ahead of us hiked out around 11:30 (crazy!) but we rested until mid afternoon. Even in the shade it was too hot, Greg came by and said it was about 43-44 degrees C.
We stayed until about 3:30 with our legs up. Only about an hour out from the water cache we encountered another rattlesnake, but this time it was lying right across the trail and wouldn't move. No matter what we did it would just lay there, we thought it might be dead as we saw ants crawling on it and it wasn't rattling or moving. The trail was pretty steep with thick scrub either side so we thought we'd dash past it, I thought I'd better make sure it was dead before we dashed past so I got a stone and skimmed its back, which finally got it moving (but not off the trail). This sent us skiming back down the trail. We saw two small bulges moving inside it and realised it must be digesting something, which might be why it wasn't moving or rattling. We ended up bush-wacking our way uphill of it to pass by (I was a little nervous because I couldn't see much around our feet). I felt pretty bad about the stone, I hope I didn't injure the poor thing. I guess I acted rashly because I'm not comfortable with snakes or how they act, I just know they can travel fast if they want to. Yelled at Greg to stop just before he stood on it because he was too distracted as to why we were up in the bush rather than on the trail. He was pretty stoaked. Made it to Barrel Spring by night fall and camped out, some other hikers were drinking beer around a fire but we were too pooped and just set up and crashed.
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