Lordsburg
After only taking a “nearo” in Lordsburg (into town in the morning and out in the afternoon), we had gotten all of the important things done before we needed to hit the trail. I have been keeping a running list on my phone of all of the things that we are going to do or buy when we show up into town. Some of these things included: showering, laundry, resupplying food, and eating as many fresh fruits and vegetables as possible! We ended up heading out of town around 6pm once the heat of the day was going away. We knew that when we left town that we had a bit of a road walk to do before we would turn off onto the trail to find somewhere that we could sleep for the night. Another calculation that has to be done is the “how far is the next water source” calculation. This determines how much water is best to carry. It’s nice to have enough so that you won’t run out, but not too much for it to weigh you down, like it did on the first day when I was leaving the monument.
Night One and Getting Lost
Night one after Lordsburg, we ended up sleeping in a nice flat spot in a farmers field. The last two nights, we didn’t bother with setting up the tent because the wind had died down. There was a bunny skipping around shortly before we set our spot up for the night, and I couldn’t help but wonder “what is he running from?”.
The next morning on the trail, we woke up early to get moving while it was still cool outside. In the desert, the goal was to keep an eye on the CDT signs while navigating on the map. There also happened to be footsteps in the sand from recent hikers. It seemed like all of the footsteps were leading us to the wrong place, and after talking to others later on, it turns out to be the spot where everyone got lost. This is when I learned to not always trust those other footprints.
The Bee Well
After finding ourselves in the field and on the map, we were now headed towards our next planned water source… this happened to be a covered well with a metric shit ton of bees buzzing around in there. Lucky me, I am the Water King! I got to plunge my CNOC water bag and my arm into the well with all of my new bee friends (several times!!). Fortunately, I did not get stung, but it was the most nerve-racking water source yet! While we were sitting near the bee well and enjoying some breakfast, Skip passed us and offered us a cookie to celebrate the upcoming “mile 100” that we would be hitting this afternoon.
Water Piñata
Later that evening, we met some hikers in our starting group, as well as two new hikers who had started the day before us and were out on the CDT as their honeymoon. We sat beside a water piñata that was made out of finished 1 gallon jugs from a water cache.
The Rest
The rest of this stretch kind of blurred together a little bit, but some of the memorable things were:
-Perfecting the art of waking up early and hiking late to avoid the worst of the heat.
-Starting to write childrens’ stories (See my upcoming titles: “The Lizard King”, and “5 Miles ‘til Breakfast”)
-Getting used to water sources that aren’t just caches.
-Seeing beautiful natural water for the first time on the trail!
-Highway road walks
-Meeting “Little Bird”: another friendly CDT hiker.
-Sleeping in an actual highway ditch complete with a barking dog and mice.
-And finally: making it into Silver City!
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