Day seven on Hustler, our last proper layover day, provided to be on and off rain, wind in the distance, and bouts of sunshine that lit up the shoreline with dramatic and ominous clouds in the background. We did some shore fishing, had another smoky fire, tried to eat as much food as possible to reduce barrel weight, took photos, and just chilled out. It’s the kind of day that’s fun for a day. Any more sitting huddled under a tarp avoiding rain and you start to get sick of it. However, things sometimes improve in the evening.

We went off and found some surprisingly decent firewood, which of course we had to split down into small pieces to get at anything dry. The on and off rain had soaked everything small, so fire building was not trivial and really did require split logs to get at the dry center. Unfortunately, the wood wasn’t dry enough, and what fire we did have quickly turned into a smokeout, with the light breeze pushing the smoke right in our faces. We ended up standing around a lot of the day, still putting more wood on the fire, because… fire? We put in the work so we wanted to benefit from it.

The entire rest of the day was spent avoiding smoke in the face, eating, and cracking jokes. We actually had some brief moments of intense sunshine that poked through intricate layers of clouds, which served to nicely light up some of the distant colors on the shoreline.

After a day of trying to huddle under a tarp that can't fully cover 4 guys in chairs from drizzle because of a small space and inconveniently located boulders in the ground, we were ready to move on from this site, so we stayed up until about 9:30pm and called it a night, hoping to get a good night's rest for our hopefully easy travel day to Shell. Before heading to bed, however, we decided we would exit a day early, on Saturday instead of Sunday. We’d all enjoyed the nice weather and colors, but we’d had our fill of the wind and rain, which is what the rest of the trip was going to be anyway, and we all didn't mind the idea of getting our Sunday back to relax and decompress with a roof over our heads.

~Hustler Lake