Tuesday, Feb 18th 2025, 0730-1830
Bill Williams River to same river, mm 65 Section 5
23 miles.
Oh what a day. It started with a bang, needing to walk about a mile and a half down the river. I wasn’t sure what to expect, given that I hadn’t asked the rangers how much water was being released. I’d seen the river flowing at the end of the previous day, but it was hard to tell how high it was. Apparently it can fluctuate a bit. I started worrying about the upcoming fords sometime in the middle of the night. What if they were too difficult?
I got a late start intentionally because it was cold in the morning, thus not fun to go wading in the water. Plus, I also needed some light to see the bottom and estimate the depths. It was bad timing on my part to start this stretch first thing in the morning. I think it would have been a much more pleasant experience on say, one of the many hot afternoons I’d suffered through. Oh well.
The first factor about the river that really stood out was just how clogged the shorelines were with debris and vegetation. The thorny trees like mesquite and acacia are basically impenetrable, so the only option is to go around them. And then there were the tamarisk and cattails, which also formed a mostly impenetrable wall, just without thorns. They grow so thick that it’s impossible to push through. I would find a nice open bench to walk along above the river, but then not be able to bust through the wall of vegetation along the shore. I had to backtrack so many times to find a reasonable opening, all made by burros.
This was one of the most unique rivers I ever traveled, but I wouldn’t call it pristine or even that great. The dam had really messed with the natural flood cycles, allowing for the vegetation to grow so thick. Besides the tamarisk, I’d guess there were a lot of other invasives. Even the river bottom was odd, with lots of algae. I filtered the river water and it had a pretty strong algae taste. But I needed water, especially when at the end I discovered that I’d lost a liter bottle at some point in my bushwhacking. There was no going back for it, since I didn’t even know where it came out and whether I could retrace my steps.
The shoreline became so clogged by the end that I simply walked the river bed along the shore and sometimes right down the middle. I probably did this for over half a mile. The water looked really deep in places, but fortunately all my crossings and channel walking amounted to nothing more than thigh-high. I was blessed with relatively long legs, so river crossings are usually a strong suit.
I flushed hundreds of ducks along the way and heard the cries of a red-tailed hawk and herons. I heard my absolute favorite song from a Canyon wren. I’d guess there were plenty of mountain lions in this area, especially with all the burros, but I still hadn’t seen one. They saw me.
I think Brett and Melissa originally intended to have the route follow the river all the way down. In testing this themselves, they faced overwhelming conditions: quicksand, bogs, mazes of thorny impenetrable bush…just awful. So they rerouted through the hills instead, giving followers just a taste of the river experience…which apparently I didn’t get enough of, as you’ll read about shortly in my ‘end of day’. As Buck30 said, “I’m appreciative of all the brutality that went into this route before my current hike!” Their significant ground-truthing got most of the wrinkles out… assuming one sticks to the route.
I wasn’t looking forward to climbing out of the canyon, carrying a bunch of water as usual. But it wasn’t that bad. Oddly, I followed a wash up a ways, which then turned into a really nice mining road… usually it’s the other way around. Coming out of the hills, the route went through a red rock sandstone formation with a really cool box canyon. It was a lot like the Hayduke. The washes all had some really lush and healthy-looking ironwood trees, which was nice to see. I took a lunch break in the box, enjoying the shade.
I’d barely hiked 10 miles by noon, so I started looking creatively for a way to get back to the river sooner for camp and water replenishment. The route made a pass by the river at mm65 and I noted that a parallel wash would take me to the river a bit sooner, where I could then reconnect with the route just half a mile down the river. It didn’t really save any miles and I still don’t know what I was thinking in doing this, but sometimes I just like to go my own way. Big Mistake.
But before this, the rest of the day was just a series of roads and washes. It got pretty hot, so I had my umbrella up all afternoon. I did end up taking my planned alternate in the parallel wash, which was easy travel. The first obstacle on my reroute came in the form of an irate burro. I was within a quarter mile of the river when all of the sudden, I heard the burro braying loudly. As usual, I was looking down at my feet and when I raised my head towards the noise, I saw him running straight at me. He was definitely charging me and his braying sounded more like a scream. Like an idiot, I just stood there, dumbfounded.
Thankfully he stopped when we made eye contact. I also think he couldn’t quite see my face at first because I had my umbrella tilted in his direction, shading myself from the sun. I’m sure he’d never seen a silver umbrella before and it probably triggered his outrage. Most horses are terrified of my umbrella, so it stands to reason that burros are too, they just react differently. They are more of a standing-ground kind of animal. I also later read that jacks are very defensive of their territories around water sources. This made sense, since we were so close to the river.
We had a stand-off for a brief moment until he wheeled around and ran off into the bushes with his couple of jennys. I made a note to myself to be much more wary around these burros going forward. This was only the beginning of my troubles. The river had signs posted and barricades to prevent vehicles from driving further. The vehicle access made me think there must be a path leading to the river, so I started following a trail which I quickly realized was made by a burro…a very short one. It was more of a tunnel through the briars.
I should have just kept following this path, since ultimately it was the only way to get through. But I thought it would be easier if I could just make it to the river bed to walk down the channel. What I didn’t understand was that further down, the river was more like a wetland without defined channels flowing…like the sheet flow in the Everglades. It was just one big bog in this spot.
Unaware, I tried to get to the river through several spots and kept getting turned away by walls of cattails. I even tried to push through the cattails but quickly sunk into mud and water up to my hips. I almost wasn’t able to turn around, on the verge of becoming permanently stuck. Finally I did find a channel of sorts, but was only able to walk about 50 feet in it before I started sinking into quicksand and mud. It was so dense in there, it felt like I was walking through a cypress dome. The whole place had a deeply foreboding feel…the river into the Heart of Darkness. I realized that if something happened to me in there, no one would ever find me again.
I came to really appreciate what Brett and Melissa had gone through in vetting the route. No wonder they had to change things. I almost turned around to walk the couple miles back up the wash to rejoin the route, but I decided to try the burro burrows through the mesquite one more time. I adjusted things on my pack to make it more streamlined and basically crawled on my hands and knees until I got to an area that started opening up again. It became pretty easy at that point, just a maze of burro trails to choose from.
I finally made it back to the route, after probably wasting over an hour to go half a mile. My shoes were soaked with mud and water again and I was a hot mess, covered in sticks and dust and bleeding from all the stabs and cuts. I lost a second water bottle, which was my crucial 1.5 liter one. Now I was down to a small 500 ml Gatorade bottle, a 700 ml smartwater bottle, and a 2 liter Evernew bag…a 3 l capacity basically. I hoped I could limp to town for 2 more days on such a limited carrying capacity.
Just before dark, I found the river channel that Brett had marked on the map and set up camp nearby. It was nowhere near as nice as my camp the night before, but at least I had plenty of water and was able to tidy up a bit. Lesson learned… don’t take alternate routes along the Bill Williams River!