Day 82: we didn’t start very early in the morning today. While we were packing up Stats passed us. He thought we would have gotten further last night, but he is taking off. Planning to do consistently 30 miles a day until the end because his flight home is Sept 5 and he starts university shortly after. I am so sad to think this will be the last time I will see him. We have been hiking together since almost the beginning, like within the first week of the hike. Separating now.…it’s just sad. When we take off we find actually guide a few lakes I wasn’t expecting. First was Heather Lake, and then the BEAUTIFUL Susie Lake. It was so clear and you could see a perfect reflection of the trees in the water. Up next was the 1700ft, 3 mile climb to the top of Dicks Pass. On the way up we ran into a group of male hikers from Korea. Why this is a big deal is because in the Sierras we basically just saw our group and a couple of others we knew. Nobody we didn’t know. But now that we’re out of the Sierras we will actually be running into other thru hikers, who most likely skipped or flip flopped to avoid the snow. When we got to the top we decided to do a 10am lunch numero uno. Everyone caught up soon, I can’t remember his trail name but one of the guys name was funny. It was like “this way” I think. Apparently he was really bad with directions. Soon Scotty appeared! He must have crushed it this morning, didn’t think we’d see him too soon. Then we started the snowy steep descent down the pass. I didn’t write it in my journal but I’m sure as per usual I fell on the descent, multiple times. We walked pass a couple more lakes, one of which we stopped to have lunch numero dos. We entered the beautiful Desolation Wilderness yesterday and it is very pleasing to the eye. Beautiful ponds, lakes, and rocks surrounding us. And intermittent snow. We hiked on to mile 1118 to Richardson Lake, making 19 miles. We were looking forward to camping around it, but the trail took awhile it seemed to get us to the campsite. There were multiple other groups around of hikers we had never met. We soon hopped in to the murky water with all of its limbs and grossness on the floor. And a weird substance at the top of the water. But it felt damn good. We made a campfire to help get the massive amount of mosquitoes away from us. Scotty is the funniest about them, he legit gets angry and the mosquitoes for biting him. He hates it. They don’t bug me much, I rarely get more than a couple bites due to my secret vitamin mosquito repellent! It was a good day, and I’m stoked this section is so short. In 2 days we will be at Donner Pass/Truckee!!!