ODT 14 – October 2 – Denio

Daily Miles: 5

Total Miles: 220

As we went to bed last night, we still didn’t have a plan for getting back to the trail today. But, after putting feelers out with Facebook, Craigslist, a local business owner, and the Chamber of Commerce, we found someone to shuttle us back to the trail.

He picked us up around 11:00am and dropped us off at the trail near Denio two hours later. On the drive over, it was nice to see the bright blue skies all around us. As we got close to Denio, we could see snow covering the mountains we had come from a few days ago.

It’s not practical for us to get beck to the spot where we left the trail…it is too far into the mountains on rough roads for a regular car to take us. When we drove with Steve two days ago, it took us almost four hours to get from their camp back to a paved road. For that reason, we decided to just restart at Denio and just accept that we would miss about fifty miles of trail.

When we started back this afternoon, it was sunny and cool. We were glad for the cool temps, since we had a climb right away. We were basically hiking cross country up a ravine. It seemed to go on forever…when we thought we were coming up the end of it, it would just make a sharp turn and continue going up.

The walking was slow, but eventually we made it to the top of the ravine and to a primitive road. There was even an old, abandoned cabin at the start of the road.

We ended up stopping early, because the route just had us going higher and we didn’t want to camp too high. Overnight temps are still predicted to be low, so we are trying to find a campsite that is more protected.

We are camped pretty close to private land tonight. We are camped among tall sage bushes. Our particular spot is sloped in two ways…our head end is lower than our foot end, and SweetPea is laying on a length-wise slope which has her sliding into Beardoh. It is already 24 degrees at 7:00pm, so we’ll see how the night goes.

Today we entered the Pueblo Mountain range. It is nice to see some good views and mountains around us. We are looking forward to a new landscape on the ODT, as the high mesas we’re getting a bit old.