I woke up after a restless night to the yips of a coyote. I hadn't been able to sleep well; something about being on a nameless mesa in cattle country with a crossing of the Rio in my near future made me antsy.
Yes, on day two of the NNML, the intrepid traveler must find their way across a pretty big river, in this season swollen with snow melt. Brett says you can ford/swim it, but I decided to use a pack raft instead. I'd never actually used a pack raft to cross a river, but at least I'd paddled it across Lake Merritt before leaving the Bay. (The guy at the lake's boating center told me I was "never going to make it" across the lake. When I did, he had to admit I had guts, but also truthfully stated that my belly-crawl exit from the raft onto the dock was "so not player.")
Anyway, before I could even get to the river and start huffing and puffing my raft into life, I had a real cross-country route down to it. Across cactus and through thorns, the route took me up and mesa, over it, and then down the side. There wasn't a human path, but there was a very good game trail.
The heat and still of mid-morning was broken by a snort at one point, and I looked up to see a pair of wild horses some thirty yards away. That would be the reason for the awesome game trail, I realized. They stood their ground. I had the familiar feeling of being in the presence of a large, majestic mammal who could kill me for a lark but probably wouldn't if I just kept my cool.
I did, they snorted some more, and then they cantered off into their 1970s Marlboro reality. I turned my attention back to the canyon wall, picking my way down one footstep at a time until I'd dropped down a thousand very rocky feet to a little flood plain.
One of the harder aspects of crossing the Rio is getting to it. It is lined with a tough, willowy band of trees; at its current level, the water actually came up well past this barricade. I scanned the shore until I found a spot where a cliff dove down to the water, keeping the waterline clear.
How do you cross a river in a pack raft? I must admit that if there's a special skill, I do not possess it. I just blew up the boat, assembled the paddle, tossed my pack in, and floated out into the swift, warm, milky-green current. A video of the crossing would no doubt be dramatic and something to show the grandkids, but I was frankly too nervous to remember to turn my phone on. So my wordsmithery will have to suffice:
I paddled like fuck.
Once on the opposite shore, I couldn't find a clear spot to get out, so ended up hopping out of the raft into chest-deep water and bashing a way through the brush, towing the raft behind me. Again, I was too adrenalized to take a picture, but this gives you the idea:
Finally up on the other bank and now in Bandelier National Monument, I packed the raft, stowed the paddle, and started looking for the path that my map showed leading up out of the canyon. To my surprise, it existed -- a very well-made, switchbacked trail led up the canyon wall. At one point, someone had expended a lot of energy building that trail, but now it was choked with growth and dead falls; clearly abandoned, now just a testament to another time. Well, that and my ticket forward.
Up top I took a shot of the canyon.
My path took me along a narrow ridge with deep canyons on either side. Towards the head of the canyons, I passed the ancient Yapashi Pueblo, now just a series of low stone walls. The weather had turned cool, and rain clouds popped over the main ridge to my north. What was it like to shelter in these stone houses during a thunderstorm, I wondered. Well, one couldn't beat the view, anyway.
Just a mile further, another ruin: the Stone Lions Shrine. As the name implies, this stone shrine contains two carved stone lion statues. If the Pueblo had given me a sensation of "huh, interesting," the stone lions framed by looming grey thunderheads had a more "let's not get cursed by the ancient dieties of a lost civilization" vibe. I mentally implored the statues not to have their living cousins hunt me for a snack and walked on.
After collecting my first good water of the trip (goodbye, cow-and-soda water!), I climbed back up into a mesa's shoulder to sleep.
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