Day: 016
Date: Wednesday, 22 May 2024
Start: T Bar Canyon
Finish: Long Canyon Mountains
Daily Kilometres: 38.8
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 456.8
Weather: Very cold early, then warm and sunny with a strong cooling wind.
Accommodation: Tent
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pop tarts
Lunch: Trail mix
Dinner: Rehydrated meals
Aches: Dave - very tired and the usual niggles; Julie - nothing reported.
Highlight: Mid-morning, as we walked along a very long stretch of forest road with almost no traffic, a forest ranger came up to us in his pick-up and was very keen to make sure we were OK as hikers - enough water, enough food, etc. Apparently he drives the road most days to check CDT hikers are OK. In the end, even though we had just had a break and a drink, we took some bottled water from him as he seemed almost disappointed that we didn't need anything.
Lowlight: Dave has so many to mention! Firstly, it was freezing when we packed up our tent this morning, literally. Julie's drink bottle had a big chunk of ice in it. We kept putting on more clothes and our hands were frozen. Then, when we started hiking, Dave was finding it difficult to hold his trekking poles because his hands were so cold and while fiddling with them, stumbled, fell sideways putting lateral pressure on one of the poles and it snapped. Very expensive Leki trekking poles, just two weeks old! Not happy! Later, when the forest ranger stopped for us (see above), he mentioned that Pie Town, our next town, was still more than 70 miles away. Later, Dave worried that this was further than he had calculated back in Silver City, and that he had made an error. It would take at least a day longer to get there, even if we hiked big miles, and we did not have enough food. We had to be in Pie Town before 9:30am on Saturday to collect the food parcel we had sent there for the next leg or, we thought, wait until Monday. We hatched a plan B whereby we would hitch/shuttle to the little town of Reserve, have most of a day off and arrive in Pie Town on Monday morning. Alas, Monday is Memorial Day, a public holiday, so no open post offices. We're working on a plan C. Then, to top Dave's day off, he took the toilet bag to dig a hole in the bush, as you do when you are hiking, and discovered the hand sanitizer had leaked badly, saturating our only roll of toilet paper! Will it never end!
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We woke to an unexpectedly cold morning (see above) and were frozen, but hiking, by 6am, willing the sun we could see bathing the hills ahead of us to hurry and reach us. Dave stumbled at one point and broke one of his trekking poles but, fortunately, Julie doesn't use hers and was happy to lend them to him.
Our early miles were up a picturesque canyon on a faint trail, but soon we climbed out of it and began a day of road walking. At first it was a 4WD track across grassland but soon we joined a gravel forest road and followed it for the rest of the day, about 28km, some of it through lovely aromatic pine forest and some of it across vast grasslands. The walking was tedious on the unchanging surface, but faster than usual.
Apart from the forest, grasslands and a handful of vehicles, we saw some distant deer early on, a squirrel, a chipmunk, and a few cattle. Water was scarce so we had some longish carries, but managed OK.
Around 6pm we found a place to set up camp in the pine forest and, as it cooled down, were in bed as soon as possible.
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