CDT Day 84 – Highway 84

Date: 9/19/20

Daily Miles: 11

Total Miles: 1528

Today definitely didn’t turn out as we had planned. We had expected to walk five miles to the state highway, hitch into Abiquiu where we had a package waiting at the post office, eat some food from the nearby convenience store, hitch back to trail and keep hiking. We figured the trip to town would only be a couple hours.

The day started off according to plan…we got up in the dark and made good time to the highway. Our deadline for getting to the post office was 10:30am (the post office is technically closed today since it is a Saturday, but we were told that a worker would be there sorting mail and we could knock on the back door for our package) and we wanted to give ourselves lots of time to get a hitch so we were down at the road at 8:00am.

While there was plenty of traffic on the road, we tried for over two hours to get a hitch, but had zero luck. Once we realized that we were too late to still catch the postal worker and get our box, we had to decide what to do. We knew we needed to pick up more food in order to keep hiking on.

We could either hitch to Abiquiu and resupply at the convenience store or we could cross the road and hitch in the other direction to Chama (where we just were four days ago) where there was a full grocery store. We decided to go to Chama, so we crossed the road and got a hitch in under ten minutes.

It is pretty crazy that we had such a hard time hitching to Abiquiu. We feel like we have had great luck with hitching all summer, even when there was four of us. Today was our final hitch of this trip and we struck out. At least the hitch to Chama was nice…in the back of a pickup truck (Beardoh’s favorite).

When we got to a Chama, we went to the breakfast joint and regrouped. The hitch into Chama was long and we weren’t sure how easy it was going to be to hitch back. We decided to reach out to the local Trail Angels, Lori and Marc, (Marc had given us a ride to Cumbres Pass four days ago). Luckily they were nearby and were happy to give us a ride back to trail. Yeah!

We headed to the grocery store, got our resupply and then Lori and Marc drove us back out to the trail. We were so grateful for their continued generosity and assistance.

We got back to the trail a little after 2pm. We sat in a bit of shade to arrange our new food in our packs. We were pretty unmotivated to hike and it was quite warm, so we just laid down on our pads and listened to a podcast. Finally at 3pm, seven hours after first getting down to the highway, we were continuing down the trail.

When we were in town, we didn’t drink much…just a smoothie with breakfast. We did remember to pick up water in town for our long waterless stretch coming up (15 miles). But we didn’t really factor in that we would want to drink a lot before we even started walking. So, in reality, we are a bit short on water.

We decided to walk a bit later into the evening, since it is cool and we are getting up extra early tomorrow to hike in the cool temperatures in order to minimize our thirst. We have about eight miles to hike tomorrow before we get to our next water source. Chance are that we will down a whole liter of water each once we get there.

The walking this afternoon was pretty great. We had a climb to get to the top of a mesa. Then the trail wound along the rim of the mesa for miles. The views from the rim are really awesome…red rock cliffs and canyons. We still have several miles of this rim walking which we will finish up tomorrow morning. It should be great to watch the morning light come over the land below.