First day at school

May 13

I was too nervous to eat any of the free breakfast at our motel. I think low consumption rates are a design goal of those gross hotel waffles anyway. Lily and I each snagged a cup of their labor-camp coffee, and she drove me down to the Historic Plaza in Sante Fe. 

Time to start the NNML -- the Northern New Mexico Loop, a 500-mile-ish route designed by trail auteur Brett Tucker. It starts (and finishes) in Sante Fe, crossing the Rio Grande twice, hanging out with the CDT for about 100 miles, then strolling down the Sangre de Christos in it's way back to the aforementioned Historic Plaza. I wanted to hike some desert, and I wanted to avoid the crowds I saw last summer on the PCT. Well, I thought, here's a trail no one's heard of yet!

We kissed goodbye and she snapped a quick picture of me with the green lawn of the plaza behind. We had a quick first-day-at-school check (did I have enough snacks?). Then she drove away, leaving me to my own devices. 

 

I promptly got lost. It never ceases to amaze me about myself: Drop me in a canyon or on a ridge, and I can always get from A to B, but in an unfamiliar urban environment, I cannot tell which way is up.

Several tense moments with Google later, I was on the correct road out of Sante Fe. Architecturally, colonial yielded to quaint to quirky to Burger King in about half a mile. The route had me scoot past people's back yards and along an trashed-out arroyo, then through a parking lot to a nondescript trailhead into some open space. Up and over that hill, then up and over another, Sante Fe dropping into the distance below and the snowy Sangre de Christos in the distance to the East. Hope they melt out before I get there.

I passed a bank of mailboxes and things started to get less distinct, trailwise. This was something I had been anticipating: this route has a fair amount of hiking along deserted jeep trails, abandoned single-track and arroyos. And then there's the actual cross-country, where you just take a heading and make your way.

This wasn't full-on cross country. More like I was following a path beaten down by someone who chose to drive their truck in an arroyo in 1978. Like you could tell someone had driven there, it's just that they hadn't left a useful track for you.

This two-track wove in and out with others across open lands, through the backyards of a fancy residential neighborhood, and finally over to my first water source, Headquarters Well.

Which, as it turns out, was way too gross to take water from. Like choked with lime-green algae stagnant brown trough gross. I've drank plenty of gross water, including a lot in NM, but I decided to tough it out. Just up and over that next mesa was 1200 Foot Well.

Which was also a very gross cattle trough choked with lime-green algae. But this time I was out of water, and the sun was nudging toward the horizon. I went for it, sharing the trough with a skittish young brown cow.

The water tasted like baking soda and a bovine locker room, but it was going to keep me healthy, and I was quite grateful for that. A couple miles later I popped up the tarp and lay myself down.