The problems started around 3 in the morning and I still have no clue what happened. I woke up briefly, feeling fine, and just decided to slug down a little water before going back to sleep. Nothing unusual and nothing I have not done hundreds of times before on backpacking trips. Except this time I ended up getting very sick and I don't think I ever managed to get back to sleep. It started with what felt like a really bad case of indigestion and heart burn that just kept getting worse. That finally got bad enough that I had to go find someplace to throw up... and then the diarrhea. Back to bed for a little while. More throwing up... more diarrhea. Repeat. It was a very rough go there for a couple of hours but then I think everything was out of my system and there was nothing left. I may even have drifted off to sleep for an hour or and when I finally got up I felt a little better.

I told the others in the party about the problem as I was initially worried that I had contacted giardia somehow. Rob told me that this was probably not the case as that usually takes a week or two for the symptoms to manifest themselves once it gets into your system... and this was only the third day... and it had only been about 1½ days since I had started drinking water from Nankoweap Creek. It could not have been anything from dinner since Pam and I had the same meal and she was fine. We were also both drinking water from her filter so that was pretty much ruled out. I had absolutely no idea what was going on but it was most likely something to do with some food that I had that she didn't. Maybe the peanut butter or blueberry preserves that I had for breakfast the first couple of mornings had somehow gone bad. Maybe the cheese or the summer sausage. No idea.

So anyway I felt better in the morning. I ate some freeze-dried granola with blueberries for breakfast and still felt fine after that. Others suggested that perhaps I should skip the hike down to the river and stay at camp and rest. But I knew that was going to be a pretty easy hike and I was really looking forward to it. I was especially looking forward to being there with Pam when she finally got to the bottom of the Grand Canyon since that was really the whole point of the trip.

The hike down to the river and up to the granary was fine and I was glad I had gone along. We started the hike down a little after 7:30 and got to the river around 9:30. I still felt ok when we started the hike back around 11:30 but then about halfway back to camp I started feeling very bad again. This time it was mostly just fatigue though. It was getting warm now too and that probably didn't help. I had been drinking water but probably not enough and was really avoiding food and had not had much of anything since breakfast. I was totally exhausted by the time we got back to camp and still had the packing up and moving of camp to deal with. I really didn't know how I was going to manage that as I had to stop and rest a few times just during the packing up process. Pam and I had made some tuna sandwiches for lunch and that went down and stayed down ok but it was not a lot of food and I knew I was running low on calories... but I just didn't want to eat that much and it was hard just to get the sandwich to go down.

Camp was eventually packed up and I think we headed out around 3pm, following the creek to the west. We only had about 3 miles to cover and the first mile or so was not too bad but then the brush started getting more difficult to get through and Pam was really looking to call it a day. Somehow I managed to muster enough energy to get through this myself. It was not fun having the heavy pack on again, especially since I wasn't eating much food and it was a little heavier than it should have been by this point. We started looking for a camping spot a little sooner than I wanted to and probably ended up about a half of a mile short of my expected destination for the day. It was a nice camp though and there was good water close by. This would add a mile to tomorrows day hike to the Kolb Natural Bridge but what's another mile between friends.

We got camp setup and I was still not looking forward to dinner. This was NOT a good sign. I had to go to the bathroom almost as soon as camp was setup and it was mostly but not completely solid so there was some optimism for recovery there. Pam offered me some chicken soup while we were waiting for the main meal to heat up and that actually tasted very good. I did not enjoy the main meal at all and had to force what I could eat of it down with mouthfuls of water. That was disappointing since it was the Veggie Pad Thai dish that I had once before and really enjoyed. Part of the problem this time was that the noodles did not get re-hydrated properly and they were tasteless and chewy. Not sure how much it would have helped anyway.

After dinner we settled in for the night and I was hoping a good night's sleep would help. Before I went to bed I was feeling hungry and actually dug into a bag of nuts I had and also had a craving for chocolate so opened a bag of peanut M&Ms.