SUMMARY:  A 2013 thruhiker said, “Epic!  Everything about the CDT is epic!”  I would agree.  So far it has been WAY harder than the PCT, but walking through the desert today and looking at the epic scenery–vast and sort of alien but also beautiful–wow!  And it was  way easier today to find our way, so we made good miles.  Having cooler weather till late afternoon helped, too.  We made a cowboy camp again, and a pack of coyotes went by in the night.

DETAILS:  Brrrrr, it was COLD this morning, and we weren’t 100% sure where the trail was, so we decided to eat breakfast before we started hiking.

It didn’t take too long, though, before we were sure of our route again, and from that point on, it was mostly easy to find and follow the trail.  There were only four times when we were perplexed and wrassling with our maps trying to figure out “Which way now?”  In all four cases, we did figure it out and didn’t have to turn on the Guthook app.

It is amazing to be out here, walking through miles of total desert, yet safe and secure, with our packs full of water and food.  Most of the day there was no “trail”, and we were just following a line of posts, which turned out to be quite unpredictable–some were ridiculously easy to spot and some very difficult.  There were also a number of PUDs (Pointless Ups & Downs) over very rough rocky hills.  The one “plus” with that was looking at the geology–there are a lot of obviously volcanic features here in the desert.  Sometimes we were walking on pumice, and sometimes on sand.

A 2013 thruhiker said, “Epic! Everything about the CDT is epic!” I would agree. So far it has been way harder than the PCT, but walking through the desert today and looking at the epic scenery—vast and sort of alien, but also beautiful, was actually enjoyable.

We finally crossed the actual Continental Divide for the first time and nearby was a little oasis of green grass and shady trees with an old tire as a water trough—it looked like a fishpond with no fish.  We stopped for lunch at the bear box water cache, and I was glad to be able to set up our little Esbit stove out of the wind.  It’s been hard to do our usual hot lunch, because around 11:00 am, the wind begins to blow and by noon, it’s really blowing.  The Esbit setup does not work well in the wind.  While we were there, we met Juan (who keeps the caches stocked with water) and he told us that the guy who got lost on his first day hiking the CDT is not the only hiker who had to be rescued after the first day—a couple of years ago there was an older man who got confused and wandered off the trail.  When he didn’t show up in Lordsburg, a search began, and they found him, lost and dehydrated and hungry, but otherwise OK.  Fixit and I were amazed, because we had been able to follow the route just fine on that first day.

The afternoon was quite warm, and it included our first “squiggle” under a barbed wire fence (the first of many such squiggles!)  At the end of the day, we just cowboy camped again, and were still settling in, when along came Zippy Morocco, eating his dinner as he hiked.  Turns out he started only yesterday!!  But he is very fast, and he told us he skipped all the gullies and just walked along the road and took shortcuts wherever possible.  We thought, “Well, it took awhile, but we are glad we toughed it out.”  Zippy took off–we won’t see him again, I am sure.

Stummy and Masshole are now ahead of us, too.  They are determined to reach Lordsburg by tomorrow night.  I am not sure if we will make it that far.  If this were the PCT, and regular trail, no problem–but constantly hunting for posts and spending a lot of time trying to figure things out…that’s rough.  I still can’t “embrace the brutality.”  All I can do is take a deep breath and keep going.

But it is a beautiful, quiet evening in the desert.  Very quiet.  Here in the bootheel of New Mexico, there are no airplanes going over, no roads full of cars, no trains going by.  Just a vast sky with a zillion stars.  A pack of coyotes went by, talking to each other in their weird voices, but other than that it was just quiet.