These'll Just Have to Do

June 8

Dawn was a wash of direct sunlight on my face; ridgetops are nice that way. As I was lacing up my shoes, I noticed that all the step-kicking seemed to have taken a pretty dire toll on my shoes' structural integrity: There were two-inch-long tears in the fabric above the instep on both shoes. I fretted for a moment but then figured there wasn't much to be done about at the moment anyway. I mean, as long as they didn't literally fall off my feet, I was better off just lacing, hoping, and hiking.
The road started to drop elevation pretty much immediately, and before long I was back down below snowline. Destroyed shoes or no, this made me enjoy life. Meadows and forests traded off, light and dark versions of the same color palette. The temperature rose as the mountains dropped, and midday found me sweating at the trailhead along a two-lane highway to Sipapu Ski Resort, my next (and last) supply stop.
It's a two-mile hitch along the highway into Sipapu. It was too nice a day to hitch, though. Hitching is such a bummer for me; you are very suddenly very dependent on others, literally begging on the roadside. And while catching a ride can be exhilarating (especially if you've been out there for a while), it can also be terrifying. I've had a couple rides with people very drunk, very tweaked out, or trying to modulate the two. And while these rides make for good stories, at the time the experience is just shitty. Your adventure is quickly reduced to an open question about whether you are going to escape this tawdry Subaru with your body intact.
So in I walked, head held high. To my left was the Rio Pueblo, rushing and well up onto the grass on its banks. Above was clear blue sky, and ahead the promise of a hamburger, beer, and enough food to power me into Santa Fe. Maybe they'd even have shoes, I mused.
The resort did, in fact, have shoes. They are apparently a dealer for Salomon. I'm not a huge fan of the company -- I wore their over-named 3D XT Pro Comp shoes for a while in 2008, and they hurt my feet after a while. Still, any port in a storm, right? So I sat in the back of their little resort store, diligently trying on every kind of Salomon they had in a size 11 and hoping no one was going to scold me for putting such nice new shoes on such rotten, foul-smelling feet. (They were pretty bad, to the point where the feet smelled a little like Nacho Cheese that had been left out in the sun for two long, like several years. Humid years.) The aforementioned 3D XT Pro Comps carried the day, and I wore them over to the grocery section to see what I'd be munching on for the next couple-three days.
That's where things kind of fell apart. They had cereal, but no dried milk. Tortillas, but no beans. No stove fuel. That was gong to present a problme, as I only had enough left to boil two pints of water. No sunscreen, but at least I had a pretty good hat. No peanut butter. No peanut butter. That almost literally never happens.
Basically, they had a few cans of green chile, a dozen eggs, two packets of ramen, a couple cans of mushrooms, some graham crackers, candy, Spam, and American "cheese." Lily says that I'm good at making meals out of whatever we have left over in our kitchen, but this was outside my scope. This was Iron Chef: Post-Apocalypse Already-Looted-Grocery-Store Scavenger Edition, and I needed about 3500 calories a day.
So let's see... We'll have breakfast burritos, eggs/"cheez"/spam/mushrooms/chiles for dinner. Then for breakfast, we'll have the exact same thing. Then for lunch, tortillas. After that, we'll have ramen, then some candy for breakfast (sure why not), then graham crackers, then graham crackers. If I needed another dinner, I'd have to eat my new shoes.
I loaded my gut up on as many calories as I could, jamming a double green chile burger and a pint of Sierra Nevada at the cafe. The woman behind the counter got excited, saying she was jazzed to have a hiker in her shop, although it could have just been that I was the only customer in the dim, wooden room. She checked out my maps, trying to see if she knew where my route was going to take me (she did not). Was I going to Spirit Lake, she asked?
Not sure, I responded.
Certainly I knew about Spirit Lake, though.
Not really. It's hard to explain to people on the outside: I pass a lot of lakes, and rarely look further than one day ahead of me in my maps. One of the ironies of spending so much time in the wilderness is that simple specific joys, like that a certain alpine lake, can get crowded out by the generally heightened presence of the sublime. The edges of specific moments and places wipe into each other without narrative, leaving a blurred imprint of the vast universe but no memory of its constituent parts.
My pack was so heavy leaving the resort -- damn canned food -- that the word "laden" kept occurring to me in non sequiter phrases: It's awfully hot in the sun. The donkey was laden with too much ore by the cruel miner. I wonder what kind of plant that is? Wlo could identify it, laden down with burdens as I am, is? Laden. So it as I walked back my two miles, head held significantly less high.
Still, it was a beautiful day, and I was entering the home stretch. And maybe this nest section would have less snow! I got off the highway and crossed a roaring Rio Pueblo at the Agua Piedra campground. Through the campgorund and up the gorge of Agua Piedra Creek I went. The trail chased the stream up therough forests, then open, swampy meadow, then, not four miles in, into a snowfield.
Crap.
No way to go but forward, though. I plunged on through snow, lost the trail entirely, and started to navigate by GPS again. I passed Los Esteros pond, listed as a "tea-brown" water source on my map, and it was entirely covered in snow. Another pole snapped when I slipped down a little snowbank,and I cussed a blue streak.
I gave up on the designated trail and started to look for elk tracks. I'd followed coyote, elk, and deer tracks on this trip, but elk made for the best pathfinders. They also posthole, you can see the three-foot-deep print, but not always. As such, they are always looking for the most stable snow, that which will carry them on its surface. That snow usually carries my weight too. Conversely, if they postholed through a opatch of snow, it;s good bet to leave that patch alone. The best part about elk is 90% of the time, they are trying to follow the same trail as you, and will lead you right to the trail as it leaves a snowfield on the far side.
An hour of following my elk guides led me to a gentle place to approach the ridge. After I'd gained it, I turned to climb along it, skirting snowfields by hiking the cliff's edge ridgetop in places. Almost half my hiking light was coming from an early-rising waxing moon when I finally got over Ripley Point and down to a saddle.
No stove fuel meant no stove, so I found an old fire ring and made just enough of a fire to roast spam and cook scrambled eggs, and settled in to make myself a dinner of breakfast burritos. The fire felt amazing, such a luxury, and I soaked in the sweet light and warmth before retiring to my bag and tarp.