I slept cold. Other hikers will understand this to mean that I got just cold enough during the night that I woke up repeatedly. Every time I woke up, I'd do isometric exercises or shiver for 30 seconds, which would warm me up enough that I could sleep for ten minutes, after which I'd get cold again. It's not exactly sleep deprivation, but it does make for a bleary morning.
The weather wasn't helping. It had snowed a touch during the night, and now it was plain old cold in the canyon. I felt very old and tired, plodding up the canyon in soaking shoes with toes that wouldn't quite go numb.
There was a short-term goal in sight, however: a hot spring. I passed some abandoned forest service buildings -- looked like there had been a group of three or four rangers there at some point, probably back in the 70s, when the US still funded programs for the public good. Now they were repositories for rat shit and beer cans, oh well, yeehaw. I shivered, cursed, and climbed up the hill to the spring.
Said spring was a clear, hot pool inhabited, kind of unbelievably, by two young Japanese women in bikinis. It was all very 80s beer-commercial and hard for me to wrap my frozen head around.
They were on a hot spring tour of the southwest. I explained my hike, to which they nodded and smiled, but apparently without grasping the concept. We talked about Japan, and I mentioned I had worked for Blue Bottle, which they found exciting. Nice to see my alma mater is still big in Japan. They hunted for crystals of quartz in the pool, and I taught them the word "quartz." I hung out in the water until I was thawed, and then a bit longer, because it honestly seemed quite likely that the Duffman and Spuds McKenzie would parachute in with a monster truck or something. Or better yet, my fiancé. I left disappointed that life wouldn't go ahead and be just a little MORE weird.
I hiked on through beautiful canyon after beautiful canyon, the grass, sky, and dandelions all impossibly bright. As the morning slipped into afternoon, the sky clouded over and I gained elevation. That'd normally give me pause, but there wasn't any thunder, so I figured it was okay. Up on top of a meadows ridge, I ran into a paramilitary-type dude in a Ford Raptor who asked me for directions. He had no idea where he was, he admitted.
"I'm scouting the area," he explained. For what remained unclear.
"I've got a GPS," I offered.
"Me too," he said. Turns out he just needed someone to help him use the other essential tool of navigation: the map.
I climbed some more, it got darker, and patches of unmelted winter snow started to show up along the trail. Not auspicious, I said aloud to myself. But this old dog knows how to keep warm, I thought.
I finally stopped at around 9 pm (and 10,000 ft )in the San Pedro Parks Wilderness along the very poorly-marked and deadfall-choked Penas Negras trail. I'd been hiking by GPS for an hour and figured I would hit it again in the morning with fresh eyes and daylight. I popped the tarp up in a little forested glade and conked out as the last warmth drained from the landscape.
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