GET Day 11: Santa Theresa Wilderness

Daily Miles: 17

Total Miles: 193

Even with the wind last night, we both had a good night of sleep and didn’t even wake up when our alarm went off. Luckily, Beardoh woke up a half hour later, so we didn’t get too late of a start. The wind had ended before morning, so we were left with a clear, calm morning.

We started hiking just after 6am and had the 2.5 miles of “cross-country” left to start the day. This hiking was really slow and methodical, as we tried to keep our route to the directions laid out in the guidebook. It took us up and down ridges, into and out of small canyons, and under fences. When we finally got to the end of that section, where we met up with a discernible trail, the guidebook even congratulated us for making it through and we were pretty proud of ourselves.

The scenery this morning was pretty cool, with lots of rock outcroppings. The morning light on the mountains made us just stop and enjoy the beauty as the sun came up. This time of morning is always our favorite for hiking.

The rest of the morning was spent hiking up a fairly decent trail, finding a spring-fed trough, doing some laundry and making it to a nice viewpoint. When we stopped for an early lunch around 11:30am, we had only gone 5 miles for the day. It was crazy how slow the morning hiking was.

We continued on a trail that took very little navigation and we enjoyed the views that would come up as we walked to around 7,000 feet. We were happy when the trail finally crested and we got to walk downhill for quite awhile.

The trail turned to some rough off-road tracks and eventually fed into a dirt road. We found a water cache that we had left for ourselves before starting the trail. We ended up only needing half the water, so we left the rest of the water for other hikers coming behind us.

We had a few miles of dirt road walking to finish the day and are currently camped about half a mile off a remote dirt road. We didn’t make it to camp until after 7pm, so we are really beat. After setting up and getting into our sleeping bags, we realized that there are two buckets of cow feed about 100 feet from our camp site. We realized this after a cow walked up and started eating. Hopefully they will keep a respectful distance tonight.