CDT Day 107 – Water Woes

Date: 10/13/20

Daily Miles: 24

Total Miles: 1971

We had a rather fitful night of sleep. Not sure if it was just the noise of other people or the RV park, but we were pretty exhausted when we got up.

Pay it Forward and Dexter headed out about 15 minutes before us. We loaded up with a bunch of water, because our next expected water on trail would be 25 miles away. We put on our packs and started back up the road to the trail.

As soon as we got to the junction with the trail, we started a climb to the high point of the day, Burro Mountain. It was a steady climb up to about 8,000, which is the highest point for the rest of the trail.

Beardoh wasn’t feeling very good…probably from two bad nights of sleep in a row. So, we took a bit of a break at the top of Burro Mountain. We didn’t have any views from the top, so we just found a shady spot.

We were mostly on trail today, which was really nice. It was another really hot day. We expect it was in the high 80’s. It is supposed to be up to 90 in Lordsburg when we arrive tomorrow. We have been really surprised that is it still so hot in the middle of October.

After Burro Mtn, the trail steadily descended down to the desert. Instead of being in the pine trees from the morning, we were amongst all the pokey things…cats claw, desert holly, stag horn chollas, and agave. We definitely had to watch our step, with all the plants out to scratch us.

When we stopped for dinner, we double checked the waypoint where we were expecting to get our next water. Turns out that SweetPea didn’t read the comments from other hikers close enough. And the water we were expecting was no longer an option. That was pretty bad news, since that left us with two liters of water each to get us the remaining 18 miles into Lordsburg. What we thought was a 25 mile water carry turned into a 43 mile carry. Since it was so hot today, we had already been wishing we had more water to drink, but now we were really going to have to ration.

We walked by a water tank that we knew had some water, but a hiker had reported in the past few weeks that there were two dead skunks in the water tank. We decided to check it out anyways, since we were so low in water. We didn’t find any dead skunks, but the water was really foul. We ended up taking 2 liters just in case of emergency, but really hoped we didn’t have to use it.

We ended up hiking into the dark, with the thought of hiking more in the cooler temps in the evening. Tomorrow morning we will also break our rule again and start hiking in the dark. We want to get as far as we can before it starts to get hot out again. At this point, we are just dreaming of buying a lot of cold drinks once we get into town tomorrow.

We are cowboy camped again tonight…set up in a sandy wash. As we lay in our sleeping bags, looking up at the sky, we saw several shooting stars. Definitely a more positive note to end on for the day.