Enough of talking about me – let’s update you on Kyle’s progress! He’s had some ups and downs, so I’ll bring you up to speed now.

On or around June 14th – 3 days after we left him, he was back on the trial in the mountains somewhere north of Bridgeport, CA. So he is north of Yosemite and out of the high Sierra’s but still south of Lake Tahoe. He sent a check in that said he was wet, post-holing but OK, mentioning something about barbed wire.

When I spoke to him a few days later he said he was not having a great time. He’s big, as we know, and sinks down into the snow so he was going in up to his groin on the snow fields. He said he had gotten stuck at one point between two boulders and couldn’t get out when he sunk into the snow particularly deep. During that time he apparently twisted his knee. Adding insult to injury on the next snow field he came upon he tried to go around and when passing through some brush was tripped and fell on some barbed wire! (Uh, why am I doing this again?)

A few other thoughts from our hiker:

But the scenery is still plenty beautiful and he did get me a few of these photos here.

We spoke at Markleeville, (pronounced: mark-lee-ville, apparently he struggles with that). When in town, somehow antics ensued that involved a strange car ride, two Russians, and suddenly he ended up in So. Lake Tahoe. So from there he stayed with a guy who had a connection to a Trail Angel’s home (if you’ve read before, you know they are lovely citizens who open their homes to thru hikers) that was very remote. He took it because lodging is expensive in this area.

They were both wounded hikers. Kyle with his twisted knee, and apparently the other, named Bandage, (if you can believe that) had a massively messed up ankle. They were taken into town to an Urgent Care. His fellow hiker is now sadly, off the trail. Kyle was advised by the Pakistani Doctor who diagnosed him with a Stage 1 Sprain of his ACL to take 10 days off. To which naturally Kyle said it would be three days and no more.

So he headed back out again yesterday, and we got this spot check in from him. If you’ve never seen one, let’s see if the link will work for all of you. If not, I’ve got a screen shot below. Click HERE.

As you can see, those things are pretty cool. And he can get a message back from me via this method. Naturally you can imagine though how happy Dora and I both were to hear him say he was feeling good again! I don’t know when I’ll have another update with info from him. He can’t send me much as the only phone he has with access to the internet, he also preciously needs to conserve battery power on, as this is his only electronic source for maps and live water info. So, sending us pics and video as you can see, takes a back seat.

I’ll keep you posted on his progress and fill you in with some other stuff as I’ve got a few things to share. Keep him in your thoughts – it looks lonely out there when you see it like this above.