Daily Miles: 23
Total Miles: 97
We got up at 4:45am again after having a pretty descent night of sleep. We do like the morning walking, so it makes the early wake up time more tolerable.
The morning finished out the zig zagging trail through the Gila Valley and then we popped out near the very small town of Kearny. There is a major bridge construction project going on there, and lucky for us there is a spigot available to us at the Department of Transportation building. We were able to clean out our filter, fill up our water bottles and do some laundry. If we had had more time, we could have also charged our devices and ordered pizza.
Instead, we headed to the trail, where we had cached food for the next two days. We sorted through our stuff, ate a bit and then started walking. There was a lot of climbing, which was something we didn’t expect, even though we have hiked this section before…our memories just aren’t very good.
We met a couple of AZT hikers who said they been followed by a mountain lion last night when they were night hiking. Pretty scary stuff.
Our lunchtime water source was extremely slow, dripping about one liter every twenty minutes. And to tip it off, the spout was hard to reach. SweetPea had to get into the trough and then duck under a metal mesh cover. That small space was also shared with about a hundred bees. Luckily none of them stung her.
We continued on after collecting water for over an hour. The water was good, but we figured we had enough to get to the next source, and we needed to make more miles.
The trail wasn’t particularly interesting this afternoon. After our initial climbing earlier today, we are currently just in the middle of low rolling hills. We met several more hikers, and the final two mountain bikers this evening.
Our final water source of the day was a half mile off trail, but it turned out to be great water. Luckily all the cows left the corral as we were walking up, since the trough was where we got our water. Instead of just dipping our bottles in the trough, Beardoh crawled along a couple of boards to get to the spigot supplying the water. The water was really clear and cool. Unfortunately, the bees were not as friendly here, and Beardoh got stung.
After getting water, SweetPea was starting to feel like she was pretty low on energy. She decided she wanted an earlier stop than yesterday, so we stopped at 6:20pm when we saw a nice spot with great views from a small knob.
Another night with a sky full of stars. We even had a great sunset to watch from our campsite. It was a nice end to an exhausting and very hot day.
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