Footbridge no, hikers yes

May 22

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.

We out here

May 21

The morning dawned clear and bright. Three packets of grits and a pint of black tea later, I was climbing up along muddy jeep trails through stands of aspen and pine. The trail was climbing, but slowly, a d I got to spend a good amount of time at around 9,000 feet in elevation. That's where spring was that day -- below there, it was already hot and felt like summer, and above, the snowy state of winter still ruled. But as I passed Harris Bear Spring, it was nature in full-on party mode: Grass everywhere, aspen leaves budding, water gurgling, birdcall constant. I even saw two beetles engaged in beetle-love. The air smelled damp, bright, and fragrant. I passed a tiny private ranch inholding within the national forest, and stopped to admire the trim little barn and twenty or so cattle. Now that's a workplace, I thought. 

 

But the trail kept climbing, as they are wont to do, and pretty soon there was snow in patches among the trees. As I crossed a large open ridge, I saw a couple guys who had ridden ATVs up.

"Wow," I said. "You guys are pretty far out here."

"Us?" one of them responded with a smile and a distinctive New Mexico accent. "We was saying the same thing about you!" 

He had a point; they could be home by supper, after all. But I didn't feel like this was, for me, so much "out there" as "down home."

We traded notes on navigation, in the course of which I settled a long-running bet they'd had ("I told you you could get to Ghost Ranch from here!"). They thought my trip sounded cool and told me not to worry about bears, "they're real chill around here." My kind of locals!

The ridge tailed off and I climbed along more roads to Canjilion Lakes campground. The campground looked like a tornado had hit -- aspens downed by the hundreds littered the ground. Some looked awfully like they had been cut down, which I am at a loss to understand. 

The trail climbed gently after the campground, following Canjilion Creek. The road created a ridge to the east at around 10,000 feet, and I was suddenly confronted with a meadow completely blanketed in snow.

 

Huh, I thought. I really AM out there! 

Well, there was nothing to do but take a bearing and start walking. There was zero trail sign, so it was pretty much flying by instruments (in my case my trusty old Garmin GPS). 

My chief concern now was to get below snow line to camp. I can set up and then get snowed on, that's not so bad. But actually setting up ON snow is something for which I am not prepared. Luckily, the route obliged, taking me down to a roaring fury of a stream (listed in my guide as a "small creeklet -- don't count on it." One thing about heavy snow years, there's plenty of water to drink. I stopped to make dinner, during which I lost the last daylight, then hiked by headlamp another mile or so to put some distance between myself and the smell of my meal. At 9, I finally pulled over, kind of flung the tarp up, and crashed.

Pronounced Abby-Que

May 20

It took me the better portion of the morning to get my chores done -- packing food, doing laundry, checking on emails and the bank account. I spent a fretful hour or two reading the New York Times on my phone. The disconnect between our national political life and the the reality I am observing is enough to make one's head spin. One the one hand, there's hubris and self-interest of the least enlightened kind; on the other, a landscape and crowd that seek to dissolve the self entirely and focus on beauty and service.

And learning bluegrass.

I got everything squared away and shipshape by round noon, with notable exception: stove fuel. The teeny gift shop at Ghost Ranch didn't carry the gasoline line deicer my stove runs on. Actually, they didn't carry much of real utility except M&Ms and string cheese. Everything else seemed to fall square into the Tchotchke Category. 

I could have tried going stoveless for a stretch, but I am weak and love hot tea or coffee in the morning. The closest town, Abiquiu, was less than 20 miles away. It felt dumb to hitch and lose those hours for just one thing, but when you want it, you want it. I stopped at the front desk to ask for a sharpie to make myself a sign saying "Abiquiu," so people knew it would be a short hitch.

"Why do you need a sharpie," the concierge said, giving me a suspicious look. Did they not allow hitching? I explained my plan.

"Ah, well then," he brightened, "just use mine!" With that, he produced a sign with "Abiquiu" printed on one side and "Ghost Ranch" on the other.

"It's a good one," he said beaming, "worked great getting me to and from work all this week."

I love New Mexico.

I got a ride before I'd even hit the highway, climbing into a rented Ford Focus while still on Ghost Ranch's driveway. They were a couple from Baltimore who terrified me by asking for whom I'd voted but who made great conversation the rest of the way. (I demurred that as a midwesterner, I had been taught not to discuss religion or politics in mixed company. This was, of course, a lie.)

Abiquiu consisted, for me, of Bode's general store. It was a real general store: everything from genuine Parmesan Reggiano to 2-cycle oil. I found my fuel and got lunch in the cafe, including a surprisingly good abbey ale from a nearby monastery. The crowd filtering through was half tourists, half locals. For some people, this was clearly a social center. For others, it was a chance to stock up for the coming week.  A rail-thin young couple with running shoes caught my eye -- maybe other hikers?! -- but they were only buying vegetables, no caloric MOABs, so they must have been from another tribe of dirt hippies.

Back at Ghost Ranch, I had a lot of trouble achieving escape velocity. Maybe I should stay, I thought, watch the big finale bluegrass concert tonight. A couple people I'd met during my time there tried to get me to stay. But the weather said I had three days of hiking before a storm came in, and I wasn't keen on spending another night in a high country snow squall. I settled my pack on my shoulders and strolled out of Ghost Ranch.

 As I walked out of the facility, I walked into Arroyo desk Yeso, a beautiful box canyon. A clear line of water snaked over a sandy bed and through clumps of boulders. My route finally took me up a narrow side canyon and onto the southern end of the Mogote Ridge. I found a nice grassy patch and put myself down for a beautiful sleep.

Bluegrass and pastels

May 19

I woke up to turkeys. I could hear their gobble-gobble in the valley below. Maybe I'm close-minded, but I had never thought of turkeys as high desert birds. As I munched my way through breakfast, I kept wondering: How do they avoid the coyotes?

The hiking was easy. I bopped down through canyons to the sagebrush gorge of the Rio Chama, which I crossed on a one-lane bridge.

(Brett's maps call it the "Skull Bridge," but it just looked like a normal wooden job to me). The mesas opened up around me, painted cliffs carved concave with battlements up top.

 

On the other side, I clambered up some 1800 feet to the top of a the mesa on the northern side of the gorge. I skirted the rim for mikes, then carved inland, then dove off the side in the direction of Ghost Ranch.

Ghost Ranch is many things: It is a conference center, an artists' retreat, and the place where Georgia O'Keeffe fell in love with the desert landscape. (She visited there with the heirs to the Johnson and Johnson fortune in the 40s and decided to stay.) It is beautiful, stodgy, a touch run-down. There's something vaguely Christian about the whole thing but they don't shove it down your throat. I like it here; I wish Lily could see it. Maybe she can teach here and I'll lead retirees on hikes, I thought.

Somewhat more quotidian, they have a sweet all you can eat dining gal. Also, on this day, it was hosting a summer camp for adults who wanted to learn bluegrass. I checked myself into a room, bathroom at the other end of the building, and got right to dinner. I discussed pastels and weeding the facility's labarynth with a very nice group of retirees from Wisconsin over salmon, pork, potatoes, lentils, and cheesecake. Hello, hiker hunger.

After dinner, I sat in the facility's library and sipped whiskey while reading speeches by anti-fascist theologian Paul Tillich. A bluegrass quintet was fighting their way through Soldier's Joy in the reading room behind me, giggling at their own lack of gloss. After a while, almost all the camp atendeees congregated in the chapel for a giant session. I felt positively wrapped up in positive humanity. All these people, doing something just for the love of it, no illusions about their virtuosity. Just for the love of music and community. 

Things momentarily get real

May 18

I woke up in the middle of the night to the soft rattle of snow on my tarp. I spent a good ten seconds on expletives, then gathered all my gear into the most sheltered corners. Not a big deal, I thought, it's been a bit dicey with the weather for days. It'll pass. 

If it's started snowing unexpectedly, that means it can stop unexpectedly, I thought. I was to return to this thought several times throughout the night.

The wind picked up. I'd pitched my tarp correctly, and the wind was coming at the side I'd anchored into the ground. But the wind was getting brisk enough that crystals of already-fallen snow were being whipped up and lashed into my face. It took me a second, but I finally figured out I could just turn over. I ate a sleeve of Ritz crackers to make sure my body had adequate calories to keep warm. And then, unexpectedly, I fell fast asleep.

When I woke up in the morning, my whole field of vision was white. Dead white sky, snow blanketing the ground. Only the black icy water and trees stood out. And it was pretty damn cold, to boot. Navigation is going to be a real hassle today, I thought -- no tread visible. And, I recalled, my GPS unit had looked low on batteries at last use the night before. Also, no biggie, but my shoes and water containers were now all frozen.

 

But, I reflected, I am also Midwestern Tough and generally not prone to despair in moments when it might be appropriate. Let's get this show on the road, etc, etc. I breakfasted on coffee and little chocolate donuts and prepared to kick ass.

Or, maybe, have my ass kicked. Really it was a piquant blend of the two -- I would pick up the trail's scent, spying a log that had been cut by a trail crew's crosscut saw, or maybe an old axe blaze. I often resorted to the GPS, using it as a treasure map -- the trail should be twenty paces west, etc. 

My big goal for the morning was to make it to the CDT, which would (I hoped) have some footprints in it. It took me hours, clambering over iced dead falls and wading through snow-covered alpine swamps (which demented/cheery map makers delight in calling "parks"). I snapped a trekking pole in a snowbank. My shoelaces became frozen and encrusted in ice. There was a lot of discomfort, but also a large portion of focus and determination. Just after noon, I found the CDT.

And, glory be, there were footprints. I yelped for joy, ate some more crackers, and set out along my old frenemy, the Continental Divide Trail. 

The tread was immediately better built and clearer. The thing was blazed to death -- every fifty feet, someone had sunk a giant post with blue spray paint and a CDT logo. Pretty sure that wasn't here the last time I hiked through, I thought.

The trail started to descend through an open forest. Again, it was like a trailblazer convention -- you could navigate from one to the other by line of sight. My my, how things have changed, I mused. But to be clear: Thy've changed for the better. This trail used to be a real challenge to follow, kind of unnecessarily so. 

The trail crashed down, past the line of fresh snow, then past the remnant patches of winter snow, then finally down to highway 96. I looked back at the San Pedro Parks and gave them the finger, crossed the highway, and resumed hiking.

The route took me along pleasant open forests and down into canyons. I made my camp along a lonely stretch of dirt road. I was low on stove fuel and comfort, so I made myself a campfire. I finally tucked into the bag at just before 9 and caught some much-needed rest.

Hot springs and cold nights

May 17

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.

Leaving La Cueva

May 16

Upon waking up at the Laughing Lizard Inn, I went about the humdrum town business that supports all the wilderness hiking. I made a couple trips to the post office out on the edge of town, packed up my maps, and ate a huge burrito. I washed my socks and underwear, thereby completing the smallest and dirtiest load of laundry that town had ever seen. I sat down to write the blog and it was a full two hours before I looked up again.

That made it noon, and I figured I should get my tuchus in gear if I was going to do any hiking that day. I walked to the edge of town again and stuck out my thumb. 

It took a bit, but eventually a giant Dodge pickup pulled over (is there a non-giant Dodge?) and let me in. In accordance with hitching etiquette, I introduced myself and tried to start up a conversation. A lot of people pick up butchers for company, I learned. The trick of it is that you only try once, because maybe they're introverted and prefer silence.

I looked around the cab for a hook to hang my conversational hat on and spotted the logo for the Spartan Race series my friend Nathan likes so well.

"Are you a Spartan racer then?" I asked. He looked fit enough.

"Nope," he responded.

"Oh, I asked because of that sticker in the window. Isn't that their logo?"

"That," he said slowly, "is from a pistol I own."

Well, that was pretty much a ballgame, chit-chat-wise. I cowered back in my seat and watched the canyon walls fly by.

He let me off at Battleship Rock, where I'd popped out the day prior. I started the three-mile road walk to La Cueva, a little trading post where I'd get my food for the next leg. It was getting kind of disconcertingly cold and dark, so I stepped on the gas.

The trading post was dimly lit and kind of odd in the way that very rural outposts get. A teenage kid sat in the camping section, glued to a game on his phone. Skinny, moderately seedy dudes stopped in to do some quick shopping. A family stopped and asked if there was a mechanic, their truck had just broken down. There was no mechanic.

But, well, I'm just here to shop, right? I picked out an obscene amount of food, waddled it up to the register, and discovered -- holy shit -- that I'd mislaid my debit card.

I've been losing very important possessions my whole life. I used to go through a couple pairs of glasses a year as a kid. This rich, deep history of screwing up has lent me a certain equanimity about such situations. I took a deep breath, paid with a credit card, and got ready to hitch back to Jemez Springs.

A fisherman who had been discussing river flows with the owner looked up. 

"I'll take you, no problem," he said.

Thus did I meet Gregory Sinfuentes, who not only drove me to Jemez, he drove me back. In the car and over the dinner I bought him, we discussed trout, trucks, and camping. He revealed that he was a diabetic who had lost 100 lbs and gained control of his blood sugar through fishing.

"I used to just sit around the house in San Antonio," he said. "Then I saw a guy catch a trout one day and I said, I've got to do that." 

He told me he was a disabled vet, and that he liked sleeping in his truck with his dog. We talked about music -- he had studied composition in college -- and he revealed that his favorite music for carving through mountain canyons at high speed was Beethocen's 7th. And then he put it on, and we just watched and listened.

 

I was pretty sad to leave that man and his dog. If you ever meet Gregory, be good to him; he is a good man.

But leave I did, hiking up a little rural two-lane and then ditching the road for a(nother) abandoned two-track. That two-track threaded up San Antonio canyon, green and cold in the evening. I set up the tarp in the roadbed and tucked myself in.