CDT Day 96 – Davila Ranch

Date: 10/2/20

Daily Miles: 14

Total Miles: 1757

We decided to have a pretty relaxed day today. We stayed in our hammocks until 7:00am which felt very indulgent. We slept really good last night and it didn’t get too cold at all.

We slowly got ourselves moving…having breakfast with Carl and then sorting through our food for the next section. We didn’t start walking until 9:30am. Since we weren’t planning to walk far today, we knew that a later start was fine.

After spending time talking with Carl, we spent a lot of our time today focused on bike packing. Ever since meeting bike packers back in Atlantic City, we have been thinking about trips with bikes. Hearing Carl’s stories about biking in a lot of different countries, we are inspired to think about the possibility of doing trips like that in the future.

Our road walk continued with all gravel road today. Several folks driving by stopped to wish us well on our walk which was really nice. We even saw some folks out collecting pinyon nuts…the third group we have seen so far.

It was really hot again today which is made worse by road walking. We are exposed to the sun the whole time. Both of our faces really feel worked over by the sun. Even with our hats, bandanas and sunscreen, we end the day feeling like our faces are just radiating heat.

By 3:00pm, we had made it to our destination for the day: Davila Ranch CDT Rest Shelter. It is a metal shelter which has a shower, flush toilet, laundry, WiFi, propane stove, and frig stocked with sodas, eggs, and some veggies. It is pretty impressive how quickly we can down a cold soda.

We took showers, even though we had just showered yesterday in Pie Town. We also did laundry and made dinner with a combo of our trail dinner and some things from the frig. It was a tasty enhancement of a dinner packet we are getting tired of.

While we were cooking dinner, another hiker showed up. Old Lady Hiker is someone we had met when hiking in Colorado in July. We were surprised to see her again, because we didn’t realize she was hiking in this area. We had thought that she was just hiking up to Wyoming for the season.

We had a nice evening catching up with Old Lady Hiker and just relaxing. Tomorrow we are planning for a big mile day, so we will be getting up early again.