CDT Redux Part 2: What Have We Done?
Re-embracing the brutality of the Great Divide Basin, one day at a time.
Happy last week of October! When I began writing this post—long, long ago—it still felt like summer, and I was eating cherry tomatoes by the handfuls. Now the weather is finally turning, though for now we’ve still had no frost in Michigan. It’s coming any minute so I’ve brought in all the green hot peppers and placed them in a paper bag with a ripe apple in hopes they will yet become festively bright, but either way I will soon make them into hot sauce, my favorite source of winter vitamin C.
This second installment of our Return to the CDT has taken me much longer to write than planned even given my stated intention to take it slow. COVID walloped me from late September to early October and I’m only just returning to full strength. Nevertheless I managed to summit Mt. Washington with Isaac at an only slightly embarrassing pace, and I have an exciting West Coast hike planned next month that I’ll share when it happens. The chilly, rainy fall weather isn’t getting me down, especially as stands in comforting contrast to setting of today’s tale: the hot, dry, treeless expanse that is the Red Desert in Wyoming.
I had never heard of the 9,320 square-mile Red Desert or the Great Divide Basin within it before researching the CDT ahead of last year’s thru hike. This high-altitude desert and sagebrush steppe is as grueling to cross as the Bootheel of New Mexico, and longer, too—it’s only 85 miles from the Mexican border to Lordsburg, NM, while it’s 123 miles from Rawlins to Atlantic City. In both cases I’m leaving off adjacent miles that are still quite desert-y but are on the other side of a night in town—in all it’s more like 200 trail miles of desert in Wyoming. Water is scarce, and water caches are not nearly as common as they were down in the Bootheel where they are provided by the CDTC as part of their shuttle fee.
We find our intrepid hikers waking up on their first full day back on trail in the middle of the Great Divide Basin, with just over 60 miles remaining to Atlantic City, Wyoming. Little do they know there is a series of small past mistakes sneaking up on them, ready to pounce.
Day 2 — Fooled Again — 20 miles
Around 5:30am I looked out of my tent to see the young heifer was still standing there, calmly grazing. The morning was golden, with grouse softly clucking and tiny birds twittering in the brush by the spring, the only green for a dozen or more miles. It wasn’t as cold as the desert can be—no gloves required today for packing up. Perhaps it was the relative warmth that made me slow to notice: as I stretched myself to lean out of the head of the tent to look for the cow, my hip touched the cold hard ground through my sleeping pad. Uh oh.
I checked the air mattress and found it was still quite full. I quickly reassured myself that if it was a leak it was a very slow one, and that it was more likely I’d underinflated the pad in the first place—I like to leave it a little squishy on purpose. It had been the first night on trail after all, and I was out of practice. I’d do a better job tonight.
My bigger problem was that the blazing moon had kept me up much of the night. Why wasn’t I carrying a mask? I made a mental note to check the weight of an airplane sleep mask. Probably only a few grams? (The answer is 5 grams, less than a fifth of an ounce. I have paused the writing of this post to add it to my default backpacking kit, which lives in a clear plastic bin under the bed. Never again!)
To be fair to the moon (and to let myself off the hook), she has a lot more going on than the light she reflects. I’ve since learned it’s well established that sleep is more difficult leading up to and during a full moon. People take longer to fall asleep, wake up more frequently, are more active during sleep, and tend to stay in REM, getting little deep sleep. The full moon effects are more pronounced in women, and these effects apply equally whether or not you can see the moon—even if the sleeper is in a completely dark room.
You may recall we were excited to schedule our hike during the full moon, for the ease of night hiking it would afford. Now that I understand there is science behind my full moon sleep difficulties, I suspect I’ll take the opposite approach in the future when possible. When we attempt another thru hike, I’d like to start when the moon is new. In addition to better sleep, this will mean getting to see deep fields of stars on clear nights early in the hike, a great reward for those tough days while we get our trail legs back. How has it taken me 13 years of backpacking to figure this out? And as for that night hiking, the terrain wasn’t quite as conducive to half-lit jaunts as we had imagined. While the Basin is “flat” at scale, on a granular level it’s lumpy, scruffy, and full of tripping hazards, especially once the trail leaves the wide, dusty roads to the south of Rawlins and disappears into sagebrush.
Oh well, at least I had a good breakfast to look forward to. I fetched the bear bag, where my cold-soak rice pudding breakfast awaited me, safely ensconced in my Talenti jar which was sealed inside the Vargo Bot cookpot, which was stowed inside a nylaflume liner. (No, there are no bears in the Basin. Yes, we could’ve mailed the bear bag ahead to Atlantic City to carry into the Wind River Range where grizzly territory starts, but it seemed like a lot of bother and it would add risk: if the box didn’t arrive, we’d have to buy whatever bearproof container was available locally, and that would probably be an unwieldy bear canister.)
I could see right away that something was off with my breakfast because the fruity rice pudding hadn’t expanded to fill the Talenti jar in the least. I took a watery spoonful and confirmed, the rice was entirely raw. Instant rice is something I only buy for backpacking meals, and to buy it I have to go to a big chain grocery store I don’t normally visit. I had used Minute Rice jasmine rice last year, and was so focused on finding the word “jasmine” that I apparently didn’t notice that the box of Uncle Ben’s rice I selected didn’t say instant. I didn’t even know Uncle Ben’s sells raw, non-parboiled rice. The biggest mistake here wasn’t that I was bad at shopping, but that I didn’t try out one of the cold-soak breakfasts at home, figuring there was no need. Shakedowns are for everyone, no matter what hiking you’ve done in the past, and especially if your last trip was months ago. Another oops.
This was a problem because I was counting on those breakfasts for 325 calories and 40 grams of protein per day. I was already eating at a calorie deficit, lightening my pack by carrying less food and planning to put on the feed bag in town. What now? Could I cook it? I briefly toyed with the idea of cooking my breakfast each night after dinner, but it wasn’t workable for the desert because of the extra water it would require. I would need to leave it in the titanium Bot all night because it would be too hot to put in the Talenti, and then in the morning I’d have to use water to wash it after I ate. That’s usual for any cold soak breakfast, but it takes more water to clean up something cooked and congealed. I also worried the protein powder would end up scorching and sticking in the time it would take to get the rice tender. Sure enough, I’ve cooked a couple of them since we got home, and even with ideal cookware, a slow flame, and added coconut oil it turns out strange: bland, chewy, cottony, nauseating.
There was no time to fret about it. The heat of the day would arrive before we knew it, and we had learned from FarOut comments as well as directly from our friend Hoolen that sometime today we would pass the last trees we’d see for fifty miles. I topped up my Nalgene and collapsible 1L CNOC Vesica bottle from water Saint had collected from the spring via a convenient pipe—no filtering required. I ate a low-carb protein bar, intended to be Second Breakfast in an hour or two, as we headed over the tiny hill and onward through the windswept bowl of nothing.
Not knowing which of the water sources on the map would turn out actually to exist in the parched days of early August, we each carried two liters of water out of camp. We had just under seven miles to go to the next recently confirmed water, a perfect time to stop for Second Breakfast and (with luck) a bit of shade.
I reassured myself that being a little sleep-deprived (and the feeling of half-dreaming that can result) might be just the ticket for an enjoyable day through an otherwise mind-numbing landscape. Saint noted that with such a short distance to town we could afford to spend battery on music and audiobooks. I settled into a murder mystery audiobook by Frances Brody featuring detective Kate Shackleton. It was set in 1920s Yorkshire in winter, and the high contrast between its setting and my own helped me keep the unavoidable sun at arm’s length, mentally at least. I dissociated into the story and soon Saint had drifted well ahead and out of sight.
Before long I had arrived to the fenced enclosure where a spring was marked on the map. Some comments said the water was gross, too much cow manure, better waiting for the next source, but others said just go upstream a little. When we got there we found a fenced enclosure and some rickety steps provided for climbing over the fence. A spring ran through the enclosure with bushes and a few trees growing along it, and a couple of very fat cows enjoying it all. I walked upstream to try to find a cleaner place with faster moving water, and found Saint there already gathering water. His Sawyer was going slowly and he’d already been there awhile taking a break, so we agreed he’d get only enough for himself and I’d handle my own water with my Steripen while he moseyed on. The water tasted just fine to me despite no physical filtering of my share, and there wasn’t any sediment in my bottle. I wondered what was up with his filter.
On we went, eight miles to the next water, our last water of the day, which we’d collect from a cow pond. That would probably be good time to stop for lunch. It also seemed to line up with the mileage where we’d see the last trees until the Wind River Range. When we were a mile or two away from the cow pond we passed through a healthy stand of trees, bigger and greener than anything I’d seen on trail since well south of Rawlins last year. I got excited, feeling certain that the water source we were heading to would be tree-lined. I imagined us lunching on wide shady rocks under a sprawling willow tree like Victorians on a Sunday afternoon picnic. If Saint had been with me at the moment I might have suggested we pause there and worry about the water separately, but he was on up ahead, and with his filter going slowly it would be better to multitask and eat while we filtered. Would the trees continue?
Nope. That stand of trees was not an opening salvo but the end of the line, not even visible by the time we got to the water. The two cow ponds, one on either side of the trail with rock-lined slopes leading down to them, were entirely exposed. The one on the right was unappetizingly shallow and green, its level far below an overflow pipe connecting it to the other. But the one on the left seemed fine enough, and FarOut comments said it filtered clear and colorless. Saint gathered the water, a tedious process made more difficult by the blazing sun, picking his way between cow pies to reach beyond the algae at the pond edge, filling a 2L CNOC Vecto bag and attaching it to his Sawyer filter just as he had done earlier at the spring. As he started to squeeze the bag to try to force water through the filter faster, we saw a problem. The water was even slower now, coming out in only the faintest trickle even under the firmest pressure he could apply. Clogged as hell.
“Oops,” says Saint, “I meant to backflush this before we left.”
A Sawyer Squeeze is a physical nanofilter, with tiny nanotubes through which the water flows, leaving behind particles as small as 0.1 microns. To keep flowing well it needs to be backflushed frequently, and now and then soaked in a vinegar solution to dissolve any mineral clogs. No such procedure had been performed on this filter for many months, and it probably hadn’t been backflushed at all before being stored for the winter. The filter was so slow it was going to take us at least an hour to gather enough water for the afternoon and evening, with no additional water sources before bed, no place to hang the filter setup to let gravity do more of the work, nowhere to hide from the sun, and a very long way to walk before we’d reach a town where we could buy a new filter or the vinegar to fix this one.
I got out my Steripen and bandana, carefully pre-filtering the water from one of the Vecto bags by pouring it through my bandana and into my Nalgene before treating it with the UV pen. The only downside of a UV pen is that it can’t purify cloudy water, so I was relieved to see that the water was coming through the bandana clear and only faintly tinted from the algae in the pond. It tasted just fine after treatment. Our usual M.O. on trail is for Saint to purify large quantities of water at camp using the Sawyer, while I’m in charge of quick on-trail liters, as the Steri pen must be used with the wide-mouth Nalgene, one liter at a time. But for the rest of this section and the next, all the way from here to Pinedale, we’d need to rely on the Steri Pen as our primary water treatment. The Sawyer was simply too slow to be feasible, even in the lazy evenings, as there were no trees from which to hang it.
While we managed this frustrating water gathering process, trying in vain to find small bits of shade alongside the taller clumps of sage and finally making peace with the irresolvability of the Sawyer problems, some visitors arrived: seven wild stallions. A comment in FarOut from last year mentioned six stallions who liked this cow pond, and we were delighted to see they’d added a new brother to their band. First the horses kept their distance, watching us from the little ridge above the two cow ponds, but eventually they got tired of waiting for us to get out of their way, and picked their way around to come down from the other side. They drank from the far edge of the better pond, finally making their way to the trail beyond with a few festive kicks and circles. This excited some of the young Angus calves who had fun running along for a few moments, pretending they were horses too.
On we walked, packs heavy with three liters each of hard-won water, enough for dinner, breakfast, overnight sipping, and half of tomorrow. We knew we would have to dry camp tonight, forced to stop by the terrain. Around the 20-mile mark for the day we’d find the last flat and somewhat protected spot for at least seven miles, and it would be another 7 miles after that to the next water. This meant so we’d need to have enough water to go 14 miles in the morning. As we arrived to a trail junction that had been marked a good spot for camping, we checked our work by looking ahead on the trail in FarOut to read any comments about what was to come. Sure enough, for many miles ahead the only comments mentioning camping were to the effect of, “there’s a tiny spot you could fit a tiny tent in a pinch, to hide out from a storm.” Neither of us felt like making it a 25-mile day, especially with the next water sources looking iffy. Better to stop, get some sleep, and do the miles to the next water in the early morning before the heat of the day. Our legs were starting to cramp, neither of us having consumed enough water today, what with all the effort it took to get it and not wanting to carry more than the minimum viable quantity to camp.
I make it sound like it proceeded logically and gently, but reality was more disordered. We arrived to the crossroads we’d been awaiting only to find it seemingly too exposed and windswept for comfort. I got that old familiar claustrophobic feeling as if the trail had tricked me into putting myself in danger, tempting me to hike on when logic told me the going would get worse before it got better. We spread out the big Tyvek and flopped down on it among the sagebrush to take a break, eat a snack (I had my daily protein shake, using 12 ounces of water), and figure out if indeed we should go no farther. After a little rest and a lot of whining and staring at our phones we made our peace with stopping for the night, and set about finding the best spot to make camp. The only good spot became quickly evident, once we started paying attention to the most important feature: the absence of sharp poky things.
I found myself walking in circles trying to decide how to orient my tent both with respect to the vestibule of Saint’s tent and the likely overnight track of the moon. I struggled to make any kind of choice, stuck in a loop of assessing and reassessing each possible sliver of ground. When I finally lay down on my tent footprint to test a spot it was a struggle to make myself get back up again. I’m glad I did because what happened next was one of the highlights of the trip.
Fair warning, this is a poop story, though it isn’t graphic.
Given that we’d woken up beside water where a person should never dig a cat hole, I hadn’t taken the time for a proper *business meeting* in the morning, and I wondered if that had something to do with why I felt so blah. I put the tent footprint away in my pack for now and headed ever so slightly downhill from camp carrying only my toilet kit, aiming to walk just far enough to be out of sight when squatting. The sky glowed red above the far ridge, and as I chose a spot to dig I saw a wild stallion silhouetted there, the hair of his tail looking like Cyndi Lauper might be his stylist. I named him Party Tail.
Have you ever seen the hiker meme, perhaps on a poster in a hostel, about the five star ranking system for outdoor poops?
It goes like this, as documented by Colorado College student Jon Lamson in his excellent 2019 article entitled, “A Short Guide to Pooping Outside.” His system matches what I recall seeing on a poster at Luna’s place in East Glacier:
*: Your run-of-the mill poop. Nothing special, but a successful poop, nonetheless.
** : A poop with a view. Not only have you just successfully pooped, but you’ve done so while taking in some majestic scenery.
*** : A poop with wildlife. Who doesn’t love to see some cute animals while executing yet another successful poop?
**** : A poop with both wildlife AND a view. A truly high-class poop, surpassing even the nicest of indoor bathroom experiences.
*****: The rarest of poops. A five-star poop is a poop with a view that also includes prolonged eye contact with an animal that also happens to be pooping in unison with. Those who have been lucky enough to experience a five-star poop have often referred to it as the single defining moment of their lives.
Friends, I cannot prove it, because I am not in the habit of taking my phone with me on business meetings, but on this fine evening as the sun went down in honey, as I crouched among the brush trying to relax and let nature take its course, the dappled gray stallion on the horizon stepped closer. And closer. He trotted halfway over to me, then paused, whinnied, stamped at the ground in halfhearted (lighthearted?) protest. Then he slowly walked even closer, stopping only 20 feet away, where he stood staring at me. I was in no position to stand up let alone flee, so I hoped his whinnying and snorting was more from curiosity than irritation. He didn’t seem angry but bored, as if he were saying, “C’mon, do something. Don’t you know any tricks?”
Then he raised his tail and started to conduct a business meeting of his own, his eyes remaining locked on mine.
Five stars.
I passed the night in a twilight state, half asleep until it was time once again to reinflate my sleeping pad, its leak now fast enough to drop me to the cold ground every couple of hours. At least the wind had died down after sunset as we’d come to expect in high desert. The moon was again in my face but it didn’t bother me—to make the most of the ever-deflating pad I spent most of the night on my stomach. I was now sufficiently chronically tired to be unsure of the boundary between sleep and waking, and was experiencing a near-constant background sensation that the world was spinning quite fast and I was hunkering down a little to hang on.
I must have slept at least a little, because I dreamt about talking horses.
Day 3 — Might as Well — 14 miles
Once again we woke marveling at how cold it wasn’t. The morning went quickly, as it often does when we know we have to walk a long way to the next water and are highly motivated to get there before it gets hot. Tackling it cheerfully is the only way to keep the demon dogs at bay, the ones that say you are going to run out of water and end up passed out on the side of the trail, withering in the sun like an old prickly pear, too disoriented to press the emergency button on the Garmin. Our motivation was doubled because out here who knew whether any particular water source on the map would turn out actually to exist in August—along the way we would pass a few that had been running fast in June but were now long gone. We walked fairly close together for the first couple of miles, but then Saint pulled ahead and out of view. We would see each other at the water.
I had done a very good job saving water for the long morning hike, first by choosing the dinner that required the least water, then by being very efficient in my backcountry bidet procedures, and finally by being too scared to drink much during the evening and overnight. So I left camp with a liter and a half, more than enough for a typical 14-mile hike before the sun is high—but I was already dehydrated from not drinking enough yesterday. And since my cold soak breakfasts were a bust, now constituting nothing more than dead weight or at best emergency rations, my breakfast had been a dry bar. I felt thirsty enough to drink it all down immediately, and suspected I was down on electrolytes more than water. I made up a liter of very salty electrolytes and quickly did the time math for the miles ahead, telling myself when my Nalgene should be a quarter empty, half empty, and so on. I find it hard to measure how fast time is passing when walking in the desert, as if my brain usually measures my pace by the number of trees going by. You might think I’m worried I’ll drink it too fast, but the opposite is more dangerous: to hang onto water because you want to “have water,” arriving to the next water source still carrying a liter or more while also showing signs of severe dehydration. The water only works if you actually drink it, turns out, and I do best when I know exactly what I should be drinkinng per mile.
The first eight or nine miles rolled by uneventfully, my rations dutifully sipped. I started to make the classic CDT mistake of thinking we were ahead of the game. If we keep up this nice pace, there’s no reason to think we won’t be in Atlantic City by noon tomorrow—we’d have only 26 miles left by the time we reached the water. Heck, if we felt super motivated we could even get most of the way there tonight, and roll into town for breakfast? I congratulated myself for finally learning how to take the desert in stride!
Not so fast.
After a couple of hours I took a break, sitting in a meager spot of variegated half-shade by a clump of sage, and used some of my remaining half liter of undoctored water to make a veggie pasta salad for lunch in my Talenti. We had seemed to be on track to arrive to the water by lunchtime, but as we continued the sun grew hotter, the wind picked up and blew dust into our faces, and the terrain shifted ever so subtly from basically flat to gently uphill. The Great Divide Basin is a great big bowl, and we had begun our ascent to its northern edge, though escape was yet many miles away.
As Saint was so fond of noting last year, “anytime you think you have something in the bank, the CDT is gonna rob that bank.” Time and again, if something turns out to be refreshingly easy and straightforward on this trail, you can bet there will be a sharp correction around the next corner. In this case there was no great crisis, only the elements, the terrain, and a cascading series of small mistakes steadily depleting our accounts as we struggled ever onward, ever so slightly uphill, toward the sun and into the wind, all made worse by the feeling of urgency to get to water. By now it had been at least four nights since I had slept for more than a couple of hours, and I felt just as bone tired as if I had been on trail for a couple of months. I was fried out and scattered, wanting nothing more than for this to be over, swearing that if I were ever to hike the CDT again I’d either do the Basin in June or maybe even skip past it without a second thought. I kept checking the mileage and time only to find very little of either passing. Eventually I turned off the audiobook because I kept losing track of the story, unable to pay attention as my mind wandered again and again to various ideas of oasis: a cool creek, a pine grove, a watermelon slice, an ice-cold can of Diet Dr. Pepper.
Every now and then I took off my pack, sat down, swallowed another 100mL of warm electrolyte water, got up, and stumbled onward.
I passed by many creekbeds that had been reliable water sources in June but were now, as described in the FarOut comments, “dry as a Thanksgiving turkey.” Once lush-if-greenish ponds were reduced as of two weeks ago to slimy, murky “puddles of desperation,” water that would clog your filter and would still taste like something you shouldn’t be drinking. Now they were dried up entirely. I wondered what sorts of creatures might be hibernating in the dry, cracked mud, waiting to be reawakened in sun and melted snow next spring.
When we were still miles from water I found Saint sitting in the dirt beside the trail looking stunned and disoriented. He was forcing himself to eat a snack. I sat beside him and got out my food bag, and after I’d also had a snack we decided we weren’t ready to get up yet so we may as well have lunch. While this was not a great spot to sit, the prospects of shade weren’t improving anytime soon and we needed the rest. We sat with our backs to the sun and wind, trying to ignore the instinct that would send us scurrying along to get to shade faster. We felt like wind-up toys whose springs had finally failed for good. When we finally got up and headed on toward the water, I silently urged myself to focus on form over speed: slow down, stand up straight, lead with your solar plexus, fall gently forward until you get here. Once again Saint quickly slipped out of my view.
When at last I reached the enclosure that purportedly contained a well, I saw it was stuffed with lush grass and small shrubs. A sign on the fence said that this was a special research project of the U.S. Forest Service, and that in order to protect the fragile meadow ecosystem we were forbidden from camping inside. This proscription had not prevented a rancher from stowing a small herd of cows inside, some pregnant, some nursing calves. The ground was lumpy with potholes and deep grooves cut through the seep by cows’ hooves as they trumped around back in the muddy sprintime. Saint was well within the enclosure about fifty feet away, sitting on rocks tight against the side of a rocky slope, squeezing himself into its scant sliver of shade, the sun still mostly overhead. A few feet from the rocks stood a silver metal galvanized pipe with a handled lid on top. Inside was a well from which we could scoop clean water, no filtering required. We could see some water down among the big rocks between the well and where Saint sat.
Saint barely moved as I approached, but eventually greeted me. He was feeling awful and said he didn’t know if he was getting sick or “only” suffering from the long slog through the sun and wind, both of which were in our faces most of the time, the trail having taken a westerly turn today. I gulped down the tiny bit of electrolyte I’d carried to camp and went to gather water from the well using his titanium mug. I filled my Nalgene, came back to make another batch of electrolytes which I immediately drank, and then filled it again. Saint shared that he had been sitting there for almost an hour before I arrived and wasn’t yet feeling any better for the break. No rush, I said, it doesn’t matter how far we get today. In terms of tomorrow, the only difference between walking ten more miles today or only five would be the time we arrive to Atlantic City—breakfast, lunch, or dinner? We certainly couldn’t do 26 more tonight, the remaining distance to town, in any case. Let’s wait a while longer.
After another hour we still didn’t feel like moving. How about we stay here through dinner time and then hike on to camp a few miles from here? Or shall we get up now and dine in a few miles? We halfheartedly discussed the options, never quite making a formal decision. Instead we let the chance to decide slip away with the afternoon sun.
Throughout our long rock-lolling interlude the collective of cows had been eyeing us from across the rutted seep. We reassured ourselves that we couldn’t possibly be causing the ladies and babies any trouble getting water—there must be water seeping up where they were standing. Our reasoning? We had been around enough cattle in the past year and a half to know that they can’t be trusted not to muck up their own watering hole with excrement, and that they are capable of trampling long-reliable springs into non-existence, which is why so many springs are protected with fences. But the large rocks around this well were without debris, and the dirt and grass around them was without cow poop for at least ten feet in every direction, unheard of. They must not be able to reach the water under the rocks over here, or there would be cow pies everywhere. Right?
As evening approached, one of the cows, seemingly the matriarch, stepped a bit closer and began to moo. She came a few steps closer, mooing louder, looking us straight in the eyes. Her posture was tall and proud but calm. She came closer still. Hmmm, was she trying to get to the water after all? We spoke softly to her and encouraged her to come closer, flattening ourselves back into the rocks as much as we could so she would feel safe. Finally she reached the edge of the rock pile, and after giving us another glance to be sure, lowered her head and began to drink from beneath the rocks. The other cows and heifers had their eyes fixed on her. She had dared to approach the strangers, and she was not harmed. Water time! We quickly got the message, and cleared out.
When we were not ten feet away from the well the rest of the herd moseyed over to join her, taking their turns at the most open spot, standing guard and giving reassuring nudges to the calves. So it turned out not only were they the cleanest cows we had seen on the CDT or anywhere else, they were also the most patient.
While the cows enjoyed the well we took the opportunity to make camp just outside the fence, having finally made formal peace with walking no farther today. The ground was sloped and lumpy enough that it was challenging to find our spots, but in the end we lucked into a magnificent view of the setting sun. When camp was made we returned to the enclosure to enjoy dinner in the shelter of the rocks, the cattle having now moved along to the other end of the gulch where it seemed they would be spending the night.
We made dinner, cleaned up (that is, we took turns adding a little water to the Bot, shaking vigorously, and drinking the resulting mashed potato water), and topped up our bottles for the morning. The level of water in the pipe was significantly lower after the cows’ visit but we could still reach it with Saint’s scooping mug. We reminisced about Bad Wells We Have Known, thinking especially of a rough one in New Mexico in the Gila, the night before we met Mogul and Second Wind, when the only way to get water out of a very low and not-so-clear well was to climb on top, pull back a rusty metal lid, and lower a provided Backpacker’s Pantry chicken curry bag on a string. The bag was old and riddled with holes. I had been the one gathering water because Saint’s feet were in a bad way, and after two unsatisfying attempts at retrieving the okay-ish water I had given up and gone to gather from seeps in the ground instead. By comparison, this cold, clear, perhaps faintly cow-spit-laced, slightly-hard-to-reach water was like champagne served from a tray.
We returned to our exile just outside the fence, ready for lights out as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon. I felt more at home and at ease than I had since the start of the trip, chalking it up in equal measures to being thoroughly fed and hydrated and to the fact that my tent was pitched on a patch of actual, flexible, life-giving, grass-covered, beetle-traveled, bird-enriched, seed-loving soil. Only one more day, I told myself, and we’ll be out of the desert. Even though we’d only traveled 14 miles today before running out of steam, I had no doubt we could manage 26 tomorrow: the pull of town is strong, even a bump-in-the road town like Atlantic City. There would be burgers, and showers, and with luck a real bed.
For now, nothing to do but nestle against the earth and hope one of the little nearby hills and mesas would stand between me and the moon for at least a little while.
Next time:
We reach the sweet relief of Atlantic City and solve at least a couple of our problems. What could possibly go wrong next? Find out next week! (Yes, really!)
Instant rice pudding for breakfast and a leaky pad. Should be titled 'My Journey to Hell'
Nice post.
cheers!