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.

An Alpine Return

May 15

In the desert, waking with the sun helps. I was up and out while th day was still cool, pumping past burned-over Mesa del Rito and along the spine of knife-narrow Obsidian Ridge. The ground was littered with shards and chunks of the glassy, jet-black mineral that had given the ridge its name; very spectacular. But very bereft of humans -- the path here another long-abandoned roadbed. You can head out to the Sierras in the summertime and find a tent in every hidden mountain valley, but out here there's an accessible, spectacular ridge with a name straight out of the Lord of the Rings, and nary a soul. 

The trail continued it's climb onto Sawyer Mesa along good jeep trail and then ducked down to delicious Alamo Spring. I ran into a couple rangers who were hauling a roadkill elk out for a "sky burial." They were appropriately impressed with the whole pack-raft crossing, and generally thought it was cool to see someone so far out. 

"Where'd you come from?"

"Sante Fe."

"We didn't see your car..."

"I walked," I said.

"Cool!" they responded. Sometimes rangers are cool.

 

I cut down past Rabbit Mountain, now above 9000 feet and clearly in an alpine ecosystem. It was good to be "home," that is, in an environment I knew so well. The meadow grasses were impossibly green, offset by wildflowers and the bright tan of bare wood. The forest fire was still evident, but green aspen had grown up in the burns. I finally came down to Highway 4 along the Valle Caldera Preaerve, a huge green meadow valley. A few pretty miles of road walking later, I picked up trail 137, which lead through the paradisical canyon of the East Fork Jemez. Trout in the creek bottoms and anglers along the banks gave me some serious Fish Envy, but town lay ahead, so I hurried along. I finally popped out at the Battleship Rock trailhead.

I hitched in the back of a work truck into Jemez Springs for my first resupply, got a room and a meal. I listened as the bartender at the Los Ojos Saloon told me about what it is like to be a newcomer in the valley. ("It's hard.") She told me what it was like to be a a recent divorcee. ("It's hard.") She then told me what it is to be the victim of a hair-removal-product mishap. ("The doctor took one look at my lips and said 'Nair, right?' And I was like hell yes, Nair!")

I spent the balance of the evening listening to a free blues band at the Cafe across the street, letting big old dogs lean up against me and watching the locals two-step with each other.

Water Challenge

May 14

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. 

First day at school

May 13

I was too nervous to eat any of the free breakfast at our motel. I think low consumption rates are a design goal of those gross hotel waffles anyway. Lily and I each snagged a cup of their labor-camp coffee, and she drove me down to the Historic Plaza in Sante Fe. 

Time to start the NNML -- the Northern New Mexico Loop, a 500-mile-ish route designed by trail auteur Brett Tucker. It starts (and finishes) in Sante Fe, crossing the Rio Grande twice, hanging out with the CDT for about 100 miles, then strolling down the Sangre de Christos in it's way back to the aforementioned Historic Plaza. I wanted to hike some desert, and I wanted to avoid the crowds I saw last summer on the PCT. Well, I thought, here's a trail no one's heard of yet!

We kissed goodbye and she snapped a quick picture of me with the green lawn of the plaza behind. We had a quick first-day-at-school check (did I have enough snacks?). Then she drove away, leaving me to my own devices. 

 

I promptly got lost. It never ceases to amaze me about myself: Drop me in a canyon or on a ridge, and I can always get from A to B, but in an unfamiliar urban environment, I cannot tell which way is up.

Several tense moments with Google later, I was on the correct road out of Sante Fe. Architecturally, colonial yielded to quaint to quirky to Burger King in about half a mile. The route had me scoot past people's back yards and along an trashed-out arroyo, then through a parking lot to a nondescript trailhead into some open space. Up and over that hill, then up and over another, Sante Fe dropping into the distance below and the snowy Sangre de Christos in the distance to the East. Hope they melt out before I get there.

I passed a bank of mailboxes and things started to get less distinct, trailwise. This was something I had been anticipating: this route has a fair amount of hiking along deserted jeep trails, abandoned single-track and arroyos. And then there's the actual cross-country, where you just take a heading and make your way.

This wasn't full-on cross country. More like I was following a path beaten down by someone who chose to drive their truck in an arroyo in 1978. Like you could tell someone had driven there, it's just that they hadn't left a useful track for you.

This two-track wove in and out with others across open lands, through the backyards of a fancy residential neighborhood, and finally over to my first water source, Headquarters Well.

Which, as it turns out, was way too gross to take water from. Like choked with lime-green algae stagnant brown trough gross. I've drank plenty of gross water, including a lot in NM, but I decided to tough it out. Just up and over that next mesa was 1200 Foot Well.

Which was also a very gross cattle trough choked with lime-green algae. But this time I was out of water, and the sun was nudging toward the horizon. I went for it, sharing the trough with a skittish young brown cow.

The water tasted like baking soda and a bovine locker room, but it was going to keep me healthy, and I was quite grateful for that. A couple miles later I popped up the tarp and lay myself down. 

It was on fire when we got here

July 1

I awoke crisp and bright, the plan for an epic day ready-formed in my mind. Breakfast, breaking camp, and striding out into this new sunshine I'd been given was all that I could ask for. 

And so I rolled out the morning like a piece of pie dough, slowing to stare at the towering spires of rock and then speeding back up again. There are those days, my favorite days, when the miles are like a ball of yarn you've tossed down a slope. Your body ceases to be a cage and and becomes a sleek vehicle; your mind stops chewing the cud and reliving the past and just coolly observes the glory of the world.
Yes, these are glorious days. Days of enlightenment. Days during which you are so overly self-satisfied with how blissed-out you have become that you leave your water filter someplace and suddenly come to the grim realization that you're about to be out of water and there's nary another hiker in sight from whom you could borrow a filter or purification solution.
Huh.
Shit.
Well, I reasoned, better to drink some "live" water than no water at all. That's what I like to call untreated water when I drink it: "Live water." It's not a term I invented, but I do think it's a pretty clever rebranding of "non-potable water." Makes it seem like perhaps the bacteria and protozoa in there are new, beneficial probiotics.
Who knows, I thought to myself as I filled my Platypus with water from a little mountain stream. It's probably fine. It's not like there are that many things living up here on these alpine meadows that could shit in this water.
And on cue, a marmot stuck his insolent little head up and chirped at me. Screw you, buddy.

Thusly dispirited and brought back to the reality of my existence -- nasty, brutish, and potentially about to center around diarrhea -- I hiked down to Carson Pass.
I had great hopes for a yogi here. No, not a guided stretching instructor with vague spiritual aspirations, but an opportunity to "yogi," that is, charmingly panhandle for food and/or beer in the fashion of Yogi Bear scheming on a picnic basket. But there were few vehicles stopping as the dusk grew dim, and they were primarily big pickups and shiny BMWs -- not very good prospects. I shuffled on.

So I punched up over a notch in the ridge separating the highway from the wilderness beyond. There was a pleasant drop down into the canyon on other side. I couldn't see any sign of other campers, but I smelled smoke. There were people somewhere down there, and I intended to ask for the use of their filter.

I found camp at a stream crossing underneath a broad, sheltering pine. Just on the other side of the creek was the source of the smoke: Two boys, or perhaps they'd just crossed over into the territory of young men, were huddled next to the sad black remains of their fire. I recognized immediately that they had committed the cardinal sin of no-trace camping: They a had made a new fire ring.
Or rather, they had failed to make a new fire ring; they had just made a fire scar on the flat, grassy ground. But you know, it's bad form to scold people when you plan on begging them for the use of their water filter, so I simply said hello and prevailed upon their kindness. They regarded me with a little fear and shame, clearly cognizant of their crime.
But we both let it pass. I didn't want to chew them out, and they wouldn't have had mich to say in their own defense -- after all, it hadn't been on fire when they got there.