Tag: thru-hiking

Monday Apr 5th, 2021, 0600-1900New Mexico Border to Alma, NM, mm 3419.5 miles We had a short road walk into town, where we planned to have a big breakfast and again lunch at the Alma grill…the only restaurant around for miles. Just as we set out, we saw a herd of elk and immediately after another herd of mule deer…like they were all hanging together. Oddly, a lone cow was running after them, comically too slow to keep up. Town was as expected: a few houses and trailers with their requisite junk collections and the Alma General Store and Grill. Top priority was breakfast, then checking out the store. It was a proper general, with some livestock supplies, a gifts[…]

Sunday Apr 4th, 2021, 0600-1900Pigeon Creek to New Mexico Border Seg 18, mm 331.524 miles We made camp in a wash after reaching a graded service road the night before. We passed one guy car camping but saw no one else the rest of this day. We got another early start and decided to make it easy on ourselves by just following the service road all the way to the Blue River. The official route left the nice road for some more cross country stuff. After the previous day, I needed a little break. Plus, anticipating a dry stretch of up to 25 miles, we planned to carry water from the river to last us the rest of the day[…]

Saturday Apr 3rd, 2021, 0600-1900Cottonwood Springs Corral to Pigeon Creek Seg 16, mm 30624 miles I was a bit restless overnight. While most nights are normally dead quite, this spot featured a series of weird sounds. I think most were birds but just as I was falling asleep, I heard a loud snort followed by a nicker. Wild horses…I knew I’d seen horse poop in the canyon earlier. They apparently smelled us and were afraid to pass, eventually going by in the nearby wash based on the sound their hooves made on rocks. Ironically, in all this time, I hadn’t been disturbed by cows overnight, save for the occasional distant moo. During a recent Florida backpacking trip, I’d been tormented[…]

Friday Apr 2nd, 2021, 0615-1800Bonita Creek to Cottonwood Springs Corral, mm 28221.5 miles I love waking up to dry tent, especially when camping near a stream. And did I notice even one mosquito the night before? Not a one. Arizona hiking. Yes please! We talked to our fellow GET hikers a little more in the morning, since we doubted we’d get much of a chance again. As such, we were off just a bit later than usual. We started up a side canyon and were shortly in a fabulous box, way cooler than the day before. Huge chunks of rock (chock stones) had come down to wedge between the tight walls. It was so cool but also nerve-wracking passing beneath[…]

Thursday Apr 1st, 2021, 0730-1600Outskirts of Safford to Bonita Creek, mm 26122 miles We had a productive town stop, but I was anxious to get back to the trail. Looking at the maps during my trip planning, I’d noted another long road walk of about 20 miles out of town. Most was on dirt roads heading into the mountains, which I didn’t mind, but about 5 miles was leading out of town through suburbs and past cotton fields. A nice endpoint at Bonita Springs waited if we could hike a 27 mile day. Or, if we could get a ride past the blah outskirts of town, we could hike a more moderate day and still have time in the afternoon[…]

Wednesday Mar 31st, 2021, 0610-1000Marijilda canyon to Safford, mm 23014 miles I’ll make this a short one since this was mainly just a town day…pretty boring. We had about 10 miles of dirt roads to walk in the morning, which quickly heated up under the fully exposed sun. I felt like we were walking through a wasteland on the outskirts of town. There were the typical revolting scenes…illegal trash dumps, charred remains of waste, broken bottles and beer cans, and impromptu target ranges with spent shells strewn all over. Am I painting a bad enough picture? These are the realities of off-road vehicle access and mismanagement of lands in such close proximity to people. It was a disheartening walk, not[…]

Tuesday Mar 30th, 2021, 0610-1830Clark Peak Rec area to Marijilda canyon.22 miles It was another fun-packed day in the high mountains. We were off early, walking the road that’s known as Swift Trail most of the day. It was built by the CCC. The upper part was still snow-bound but it was easy to walk over the frozen crust in the morning. We skipped a north-facing trail that led to Webb peak, instead opting for a cross country route that brought us to the 10,000′ top (highest point on the GET route in AZ) with minimal snow. This peak also had a nice fire tower, with views to nearby Mt Graham at almost 11,000′. It rises 8,000′ from the desert[…]

Saturday & Sunday Mar 27-28th 2021Kane Spring to Klondyke Road, mm 17216 miles I’m combining 2 days, one of which was a zero. Day 10: we covered as much ground in half a day as in a full day the day prior. But the going was still not easy, at least not the first 5 miles. The trail went up up up and we lost it at the switchbacks numerous times. I didn’t see any footprints on this trail, #66. We saw quite a few older footprints the day before, which we could only assume were some other GET hikers that were 1-2 weeks ahead of us. But then we didn’t see any more footprints since before the cross country[…]

Friday Mar 26th, 2021, 0615-1700Stock pond to Kane Spring, mm 17216 miles This day held an incredible amount of stuff packed into relatively few miles. We finished the dirt road walk after less than a mile and were on a series of trails as well as 3 miles of cross country orienteering the rest of the day. We began with route finding up a canyon along a very faint trail. It crossed a creek quite a few times where it was easy to lose among the rocks. But we made pretty short work of it with our keen searching. At a saddle and stock pond, we picked up a much better trail into Holdout Canyon. The trail was so lovely[…]