I slept badly, as bugs big and little kept feeling the need to examine my face during the night. It had been so long since I'd slept at a low elevation to worry about bgs, I realized. Probably just as well that today was my last day, I really wasn't equipped to handle a mosquito hatch. But: No snow! I was below 10,000 feet and I was staying there all the way into Santa Fe. So much the better, as I had a good 35 miles or so to make before the end of the trail. And I was pretty committed to finishing that day, as I didn't have anything to make for dinner that night.
So I hauled myself upright, broke camp, and got hiking as quickly as I could. My progress was slowed by blowdowns, as a lot of treees killed by the fire had fallen over the trail and not yet been cleared. The blowdowns started as single trees to climb over, under, or around. Then there were pairs of trees that had come down together, increasing the complexity of the maneuvers needed to get past them. Then threes, then fours, then at some point I found myself in a multi-tree matrix that necessitated acting like I was trying out for American Ninja just to get forward a foot.
Maybe I shouldn'ta taken the shortcut, I grumbled to myself. I lost three hours of my morning, scraping and belly-crawl squeezing and flopping my way through the trees. As always, I reached that point were I realized my loyalty lay with the goal, not the path, and I started to chart the shortest possible path cross-country to the edge of the burned section.
Back out of that section, I had clear trail. This, my last day on the trail, was one of the only days I had where I had clear singletrack most of the day. The route dove down through my elevation by thousands of feet, thoughtlessly spending all the work it took me to climb the ridge at the other end. I passed an elderly couple eating lunch trailside with a crosscut saw resting nearby. Apparently they were engaged in the sisyphean task of clearing out the deadfalls; I thanked them for their work and moved on. At Horsethief Meadows, my alternate met up with the main trail and climbed up over a bluff, then down past Stewart Lake. I passed another, smaller lake, and glanced down at my map to see the name.
Spirit Lake. Huh. So that's where it is.
The trail passed a major trailhead and campground and continued, mostly down and mostly south, along mountain bike trails. Every biker I met stopped to allow me to pass; note the excellent etiquette! It got hotter the further I went, with the vegetation increasingly sere and sparse. I walked along a stream with a lot of trail runners, a couple of whom asked me where i was going or had been.They got treated to my explanation trailing off in the distance: "A 500-mile loop through Northern New Mexico..."
Because I didn't have the time. I was about 9 miles out and had about 2 hours of sunlight left. I started hustling. I started doing the math in my mind -- if I can hit four miles an hour, I'd get in just after 8:30, and if I could hit five miles an hour, I could get there by 8:40 or so, etc. But how was I going to hike 5 miles an hour?
I started using the "scout pace," a relic of my old Boy Scout training.The Scout pace is 100 paces at a run, 100 paces at a walk. Running with a pack, even if it's only 100 paces at a light jog, wasn't really what the doctor ordered after the last few days of strenuous travel. But with each passing mile, the roofs of Sante Fe got closer.
Now I switched to municipal trails, which got very steep, climbing up and over ridges and down into steep, narrow valleys. At the next trailhead, I got off the trails and switched to the roads. Heck, I'm not a purist, and I was losing light.
I waked the rest of the way into Santa Fe on the Hyde Park Road, a two-lane highway. There were cars, but the evening was nice, cool, and relatively quiet. I could smell someone cooking beef, and could hear a live band playing somewhere far off downtown. About two miles from the plaza, the end of my trip, I watched a very young buck step gingerly down into the road. He stopped dead when he saw me,and we spent the better part of a minute just regarding each other. I don;t think he quite knew what to make of me, and wasn't going to voluntarily end my last communion with wildlife on this trip.
And then he looked up, his reverie over, and walked off the other side of the road.
It was full dark as I finally entered the streets of Santa Fe. I walked straight down to the plaza and had two very proper elderly women take my picture.
I was punch-drunk exhausted and wandered the square for another ten minutes. I was more than a little afraid that I had forgotten how to stop walking. A restaraunt appeared before my shell-shocked eyes and I went in. It was a fancy place catering to the tourist trade, and I bet I was the stinkiest dude they'd ever served a smothered burrito.
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