It snowed on me a bit during the night. Just a reminder, I thought, of the impending storm that was now only a day off.
I gotta make some miles today, I thought, munching on my grits.
Unfortunately the day started with a confusing jumble of jeep roads, cross-country, and newly-built CDT. The CDT, where it existed as its own single track path, was good. But I don't trust the CDT -- I've had too many experiences where the trail just peters out. So I spent a lot of the morning with my GPS in my hand, taking bearings and heading out over grass, deadfalls, and brush.
The trail then dropped steeply down into the canyon of Rio Vallecitos, which was a burly mountain stream in full flood. No worries, I thought, my guidebook says there is a footbridge. Didn't see it, though.
I hiked up the stream bank for half a mile; no bridge.
I hiked down the stream bank for half a mile; no bridge.
Well. I took stock of the situation. I could ford that creek, I thought. It looked just inside the bounds of doable. But I really, really didn't want to. There was a sketchy, slippery log across...
I took the log.
Safely on the other side, I climbed back up out of the grassy canyon. The trail paralleled a well-graded dirt road for about five miles, and I decided to hike the road. What am I anyway, a purist?
I plugged into an audiobook and let the miles unspool with the narrative. I thought about Lily, who I knew had just finished her dive to the ocean floor to see yeti crabs congregate at cold methane seeps (their native habitat). I'm so lucky to have found someone who gets me and lets me do this sort of thing, I thought.
I miss Lily.
I broke out of forest and onto a snow-covered field. As I trudged up the meadow, I saw a gate for a ranch called "Yonderosa." Who lives there, I wondered. What path leads you to own a huge spread out in the exact middle of nowhere? What does that life taste like?
The light had been getting dimmer and the air chillier, and finally the sky started to spot snow at me. I stopped to protect my pack from the rain and pushed on, retreating deeper into my audiobook (Earth Abides, incidentally, a thoughtful if casually racist novel from the 40s about the apocalypse).
Out on the other side of the field, I clambered down into a canyon, losing the trail and just going straight down toward the creek crossing below. Once down in the canyon, I noticed something unnaturally red out of the corner of my eye.
That's a tent.
Those are people!
And so I met my first fellow hikers on this trail: Thunder and Snow, a couple, a red-headed man named Tennesteve, and a woman named Fun Size. They were all CDT hikers, and they looked just about as gobsmacked as I did.
But in their case, they had a better reason.
"I think you almost scared a bear into our camp," Steve said. Apparently my arrival had been directly proceeded by bear walking right past their camp.
I made dinner there with them and considered staying, but there was still a little daylight left and I was amped up on human company. after half an hour, I packed back up and climbed out of the canyon and onto a mesa rim.
It was the prettiest piece of the hike so far. Below me to my left, a herd of elk grazed the tender new shoots of spring grass. A couple coyotes yippes and cooed in the valley, and the sun backlightbthe range before me. In groups of two or five, the elks climbed up onto the mesa and ran off into the twilight. They were close enough that I could smell them.
I ended to night by hiking a bit too far, getting myself into a snowed-over hillside with no sunlight left. After a slightly tricky headlamp traverse, I got to the south-facing slope of the canyon and got a tiny, rank little spot among some dead trees. It'll do, I thought.
And it did.
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