On the Road Again, Climbing Mesas With My Friends: CDT Days 24-31
In which we finally get some elevation.
This article was originally published on June 2, 2024 on The Trek.co.
Day 24 — Goodbye, Pie; Hello, Dry
We walked out of Pie Town bright and early wearing bouncy new shoes and carrying a few extra snacks from the Toaster House and from swaps with fellow hikers. I was especially excited about the cheddar jalapeño instant grits I’d scored from Piñata, and wondering how they would do as a cold soak. A++!
The road walk to Pie Town, which several of us had heard was a doozy, had turned out to be No Big Deal—mostly tree-lined dirt roads, with a beautiful climb through the Mangas range. We were not aware of the grueling stretch now in front of us, or we might have been more on guard. It started off gently enough, on a dirt and gravel road with minimal traffic and plenty of friendly waves from those who did pass. We got our first water of the day from the kind folks at TLC Ranch, who offer a place to rest by their historic roadside homestead.
Heading north to Grants, we had the choice to continue on the official route, which would track a fifty-mile lava flow (hard on the shoes and joints, but with an ice cream shop 3/4 of the way through), or to take the Cebolla alternate which would join the paved road to Grants at a much earlier point than the official route, connecting some attractive tourist-facing spots in the Cibola National Forest.
You may be noting the name difference: I spent this section thinking that Cibola was a bastardization of Cebolla, the Spanish word for onion, and that the words were being used interchangeably. I was wrong—Cibola is a Spanish transliteration of the name of one of the local Pueblo tribes. There is a county named Cibola, and Cebolla is not in it.)
None in our crew felt like shredding our new shoes on the black lava, and the Cebolla route would save us many miles. We also felt empowered by inside information: a server at The Gatherin Place (yes I’m still talking about this fantastic little restaurant) told us that all of the tourist spots (The Narrows, La Ventana Arch, etc.) on the road to Grants had water. This turned out to be incorrect, but we wouldn’t find that out until the next day.
We hiked just over 23 miles to a solar well (aka a cow tank perpetually filled by a solar-powered pump), once again making camp among dried cow pies, but with a nice easterly view of a nearby pond where we hoped to see elk at dawn.
Day 25 — A Narrow(s) Escape
I slept in later than intended, and Saint reported he had heard some animals down by the pond but hadn’t looked out in time to see them. Our friends, who had cowboy camped, were back on the road at least half an hour ahead of us. I had overheard them discussing how much water to take, and lazily relied on what I thought they said. I carried only 1.5 liters, remembering the water we’d heard about at the tourist spots. Rather than following the portion of the Cebolla alternate that would leave the road for a while (and had a couple of sure-thing cow troughs), we decided to stick with the road and get to town a little faster. Trailwise, I have no regrets about this choice—friends who took the full alternate confirm that despite being a national monument area it had even more cow poop than we’d been seeing, and no better views than from the road. Waterwise, well. We were not water wise.
The day was blazingly hot and clear, and the asphalt reflected the heat up at us. As we approached the point where we would leave the official route, which headed west to the lava flow, we were passed by a few hikers, including GB, who told us about the ice cream store, and Energizer, who had the same intention. The day got hotter, but we were so confident about water ahead that we squandered some water by preparing our cold soak lunches early. Our bottles were nearly empty long before we reached the purported first water site and realized a new wrench: the tourist site, which may or may not have water, had a mile-long driveway. If we were to walk in and find no water, we’d have to walk back out again, adding two miles for no reason. We trudged on. But soon I was feeling weak and dizzy, and having trouble making sense of the map to scout the next water.
We flagged down a passing truck, and its driver moved his revolver, drill, and other gear to make room for us in his extended cab, handing us Powerade and water before dropping us just a couple miles up the road at the path to another solar tank. (He also suggested that helping him drywall his cabin would be a better use of our time than going for this crazy walk; we demurred.) I felt silly not to have understood that the well was so close, having misread the map—and was embarrassed to have been seen hitching by our friends who had managed to get there under their own power, even though it was such a short hitch. We got water and ate lunch, but I didn’t drink as much water as I should have, and I left the well nearly as depleted as I had arrived. That’s what dehydration does to you—it changes your logic, making it harder to save yourself.
With about 13 miles already traveled, we all agreed we’d proceed another 6+ miles to The Narrows, a tourist site with a picnic area, privy, and a scenic hiking trail up over a cliff. CDT hikers are permitted to camp anywhere on the public lands so long as we are at least a quarter mile from a picnic area, and we figured we could climb the cliff and see what lay beyond. But first we had to get there.
I soon fell behind the group and then out of their sight, and once again my water was going too fast. I took break after break on the side of the road anytime there was a bush that could cast a shadow. I told myself I just needed to take my time and someday I would get there.
When I had about a mile to go, my feet seemed barely to be moving no matter how hard I worked. Then I started seeing things—the cobalt blue of Saint’s sun hoodie, and the red of Second Wind’s new Altras.
Soon they were both at my side. I teared up as they took my pack from me and Saint put it on.
“I saw how you were walking after lunch,” Second Wind said. “I know how you hike, and that didn’t look like you.” As a retired Marine Corps officer he has a lot experience making sure the people around him are safe.
Soon we were with the others in the parking lot at The Narrows, and I was lying under a big shade tree with a wet bandana on my forehead, eating Skittles from Little Bird’s stash. I felt so grateful and cared for, and realized I’d been near heat exhaustion for most of the day. From then on, I would never ignore the persistent advice Second Wind gave to all of us, to drink a liter at every water source.
We scrambled up over the cliff and found amazing sites sufficiently far from the public area. At dusk a man rode by on horseback with two terriers following dutifully. He didn’t seem to see us.
Day 26 — Subway or Bust
In the morning I again fell behind the pack, but by choice: I wanted to be sure to take it easy, and I was excited to stop by the La Ventana Arch tourist site, with a well-groomed trail to the perfect viewing spot. (And let’s be honest, a privy.) Water was still in short supply—with no water at the Narrows, we had camped dry, and needed to make the rest of yesterday’s water last until we reached the ranger station eleven miles away. A tourist offered me water and I accepted a small bottle. I took lots of breaks, including a pack-off lie-down in a beautiful sandstone grotto that showed no sign of recent human activity.
I also watched a juvenile prairie falcon (which looks and sounds a lot like a hawk) refining her flying skills, seeming to express panic as she leapt from the family nest in a high sandstone cliff along the roadside and surfed the strong and gusty wind above the roadway. I passed the Acoma Pueblo lands and wished I could justify crossing the fence to check out their cattle tank.
Soon Hoolen, whom I hadn’t seen since we all camped at the solar well a couple of nights before, appeared on the road behind me. The road was getting me down, but he was cheerful and talkative and the miles swam by.
As we were walking a car pulled alongside to ask if we needed water. It turned out to be Turkey, who had left trail for some family events and now was returning to her hike. She would restart around Doc Campbell’s, in the Gila, so she didn’t need to carry much water, but she wanted carrying capacity. I gladly helped her turn a newly purchased bottle into an empty by transferring her water to my bottle. She was jubilant: she turned out to own a small share of Seize the Gray, the horse who had just won the Preakness.
At the ranger station we all met up again and decided: would we walk almost all the way to Grants and try to find a safe spot to camp so we could nearo in the morning, or would we try to make it to town? We decided to get ourselves to the Subway at the gas station where I-40 intersects 117, on Route 66, and figure it out from there. Never has a sub tasted so good.
Realizing it was another five miles to the “nearby” hotels of Grants, Saint and I gave up on purity once and for all and stuck out our thumbs. Soon a PA student on a surgical rotation was dropping us off at the SureStay, where there seemed to be more hikers than we'd even seen at the Toaster House.
Days 27-28 — Gritty Gargantuan Grants
We opted to stay in Grants for two full zero days to recover from all that road walking. We also needed extra time to get our resupply and do various chores because Grants, though small, is ridiculously spread out. Once upon a time it had several small motels near the center of town, but when the freeway came and the national chains all built hotels at the exit the local ones mostly failed. Vacant and riddled with broken windows, the old motels are now prone to accidental fires caused by unhoused people trying to stay warm. The town plans to bulldozer them.
It was a treacherous 3-mile walk to the post office over a highway bridge with no shoulder, and there are no cabs or public transit except for a “bus” that has to be booked in advance and doesn’t follow a regular route (but might pick you up if convenient to them). We ended up relying on our feet and hitching, and while we heard about worthy local restaurants they were all too far away to be practical. The hikers settled mostly for Dairy Queen, Taco Bell, and Denny’s. The only local grocery was much too far by foot so we reluctantly shopped for snacks at Walmart and the gas station.
We did manage one local meal, when we ordered pizza and salads and had a little pizza party in the hotel lobby to say goodbye to Piñata and Long Haul, who were finishing their section hike in Grants. We had to hold down all the plates and napkins every time someone opened the door to the windy evening.
As with much of rural NM, the people were friendly but didn’t seem to feel any urgency about the meager jobs available to them. The front desk staff could barely manage to check in one guest every twenty minutes, dubiously blaming the computer. Except for a tiny patch of the town by the post office where investments had been made in a cheerful park and playground, the town left us feeling sad. It was time to get back on trail.
When Hoolen and a friend attempted their CDT hike in the early 90’s they started making up alliterative descriptive names for the towns, e.g., “Luscious Largedirt Lordsburg.” I suggested Grants could be “Gritty Gargantuan” for its depressed sprawl. May change come soon for these lovely folks.
Days 29-30 — The Good Stuff
If you are looking for a bit of the NM CDT to section hike, the gem you seek is the stretch from Grants to Cuba: five days of unbelievable, ever-changing landscape, with the option to summit Mt. Taylor. It’s a close call which was better between this and the Gila alternate—together they showcase the beauty of New Mexico that is NOT desolate lunar landscape.
Day 29 — Get Outta Town
We walked across Grants in the morning with lots of water, taking an unofficial route that ran near the town’s three (!) prisons to finally join the road running north to the Mt. Taylor trailhead which we reached after seven miles. We were all delighted to find a cooler of Gatorade and water which meant we didn’t have to dip into the supply we were carrying—especially welcome after our hike through town not taken us near a single gas station or market.
Almost immediately the trail got steep and tough, climbing over 1,000 feet up the side of a huge mesa over only a mile and a half of trail. I dropped back again and took my time.
Highrise, so named because he works on skyscrapers in Chicago, appeared behind me and we chatted a bit. I let him pass me, and he turned to walk backwards a couple of steps so he could look at me while we were talking—and he stumbled directly into a tree cholla, the prickliest of all the desert plants, with hooked barbs. He was wearing pants, and still managed to take several barbs to the knee. He said this was nothing compared to the first week on trail when he had naively brushed into one with his forearm, earning fifty barbs that took forever to remove. No more backwards walking! Despite needing to pull over to deal with this chaos, he soon passed me again.
Suddenly we were out of the hot desert canyon with its cacti and dust, and into a world of pines and dappled shade as we followed the mesa skirting Mount Taylor. Hooray! A couple of folks decided they would take the Mt. Taylor alternate to the summit, but I was content to continue moving through this lush and diverse forest scape, with beautiful views of the peak often appearing around corners. I caught up with the group at a gorgeous vista just a couple of miles before the alternate junction. We all took a long break in the dappled shade, and posed for photos on the cliff edge.
After some trial and error to find a spring so we could make camp for the night, we inadvertently overshot the water by a bit, and even though Highrise told us it was close and quite good, we stubbornly decided to continue another two miles. We camped by a cold stream on a tree-covered ridge.
Day 30 — Troll Encounter
We woke to gobbling turkeys, and spent a joyful day in pines, firs, and finally a thick stand of aspens where I caught a glimpse of a black bear before we descended to open grassland and then climbed up again, skirting our way along the mesa over and over again.
Saint and I saw Little Bird and Mogul at a water tank, and heard they planned to hike at least five more miles to an alleged pond; we thought we’d do about eight more, and maybe catch Second Wind.
While at the water tank we met the only jerk we’ve encountered on this trail, a man in maybe his late twenties who arrived to the tank and immediately started putting people down. When he started in on my UL Nalgene I pretended not to know he was negging, and started telling him my very good reasons for having one, which I’ll have to write up sometime for y’all. Bottom line, he seemed like he had low self esteem and needed to assert his superiority, and also like maybe he learned to thru hike from a YouTube comments section. Fortunately he was long-legged and fast, so with luck we will never see him again. If he had been at all interested in making friends with our crew he would have learned that some of them had hiked thousands of miles before he was even born.
The trail continued on wide dirt road skirting in and out of brush and low trees. The big pond turned out to be dried up, which we expected. We didn’t see our friends—it turned out they made it another mile after our fatigue caught up with us. We camped off the side of a dirt road under some trees, with pleasant pine needles and duff for a soft surface. Having seen a bear in the section, I got a little more serious about putting all of our food and trash away in the Ursack, a good habit to make automatic before we get to grizzly country.
Day 31 — Catching Up
About an hour into our hike we found “Second Wind 7:40am” scrawled in the dirt, letting us know he wasn’t as far ahead as we had guessed. We knew the day would be especially challenging with regard to water: Big Spoon had helpfully compiled all of the most recent FarOut comments from the upcoming water sources, and most of them were dried up. There was one certain source eleven miles from our camp: a spring off trail with water so tasty a hiker had commented, “I would pay for this water.” The catch? It required a half-hour round trip down 600 feet into a canyon. Comments also said there were water jugs at the trailhead that might be full. We crossed our fingers, but sure enough when we got there the jugs were all empty. There was nothing to do but take a side quest for water.
The trail down to the spring started with an easy dip in and out of a small ravine, and then we saw what a magnificent canyon lay beyond. The trail was mostly gentle switchback and then turned into a rocky scramble. The spring turned out to be a pipe flowing into a concrete cistern, with barbed wire to keep the cattle from mucking up the side with the pipe. I crawled under the wire to fill all of our bottles, and indeed it was so cold, clear, and tasty I would have paid for it.
As we started the scramble back up, we turned a little corner and encountered Hoolen. Because the jugs at the top were empty—and he thought he had just seen Little Bird behind him—he would gather three extra liters to leave at the cache. I felt so grateful to know such a good person, and regretted not bringing one of the empty jugs down into the canyon myself.
After another full day of rolling along the edge of the mesa it was finally time to drop down into a huge canyon via a steep three-mile descent. Saint had pulled ahead of me to catch up with Little Bird and Mogul, who were indeed ahead of us—the person who had been behind Hoolen turned out to be Ricky. I took my time as I always do on loose steep descents, and despite a full water carry from the canyon I was running low.
When I finally reached the spring where the others had stopped for the night I had to convince a huge bull to cede the trail so I could join them. He hadn’t given the others any trouble—this keeps happening only to me!
We camped a bit up the ridge, an unfortunate choice: it turned out to be a very windy night, and dirt blew into our nostrils and mouths while we slept, coating everything inside the tent in a fine dust despite tying the fly down tight. I was so grumpy about being surrounded by powdered cow poop yet again.
In the morning the bull was there again blocking the trail, full of attitude. But he was a beauty, especially with the sun rising behind him. We set out to climb another mesa, to begin making our way around this huge canyon, and onward toward Cuba.
