{"id":317,"date":"2016-05-24T23:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T23:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/?p=317"},"modified":"2017-05-22T14:19:52","modified_gmt":"2017-05-22T14:19:52","slug":"rock-walking-and-climbing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/2016\/05\/24\/rock-walking-and-climbing\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday May 24 Rock Walking and Climbing"},"content":{"rendered":"

SUMMARY:\u00a0 <\/strong>Today was like a rock-walking and climbing tour…all kinds of rocks, colors, formations, and mind-blowing scenery.\u00a0 It did involve a couple of scary places (for me) where all that kept me going was the thought, “If I can handle the scary stuff on Mt. Whitney, I can handle this.”\u00a0 In the afternoon, an extraordinary chain of events happened. A guy named Slapshot passed us and 1) learned our trail names and\"may-24-16\" 2)\u00a0 That we were headed for the water cache 5 miles away.\u00a0 We got to the roadcrossing where the cache was supposed to be, and could find no sign of it, so we flagged down a passing car and got water.\u00a0 But Slapshot had found the cache AND a note inside for US to “Call your daughter Mercy ASAP.”\u00a0 So as we went cruising by the cache, not planning to stop because we’d gotten water already, he flagged us down–“Hey, Fixit and 3rd Monty–there’s a note for you!”\u00a0 Without him, we would never have seen the note.\u00a0 It was bad news.\u00a0 Our other daughter’s husband has suddenly died.\u00a0 Oh no!\u00a0 The rest of the day I was hiking all choked up.<\/p>\n

DETAILS: <\/strong>Scenery-wise, today was a mindblowingly amazing day.\u00a0 I would not have missed it for anything!\u00a0 But it was also a very tough day, hikingwise–“embrace the brutality” definitely applied.<\/p>\n

The day began with packing up at 5:20, then heading for a spring not too far ahead.\u00a0 When we got there, we discovered HoB camped on a little hill nearby.\u00a0 He came down and joined us, and together we looked at how to get at the water. HoB said when he arrived at the spring last night, it was too dark to\u00a0see anything, so\u00a0now we were all\u00a0studying what to do.\u00a0 Turned out that it works like this: the water is down in the ground, in a sort of tank, with large flat pieces of stone laid over the top to keep critters from falling in.\u00a0 First you move a stone out of the way, then you lie down on your stomach and reach down to get at the water.\u00a0 We had a look at the first bottlefull–it appeared to be OK, but we decided to AquaMira it, just in case.<\/p>\n

We walked on with HoB until we stopped at 7:00 for breakfast.\u00a0 Fixit is not feeling well, and he was not hiking at his usual speed.\u00a0 He said that the problem is that for the last 2 nights, when he lies down, he starts to have trouble breathing.\u00a0 He sort of solved the problem by propping himself up with his pack, but still didn’t sleep well and now he is feeling very tired.\u00a0 Every hill leaves him out of breath, and he was hiking at a snail’s pace, often stopping to lie down.\u00a0\u00a0 I was very worried about him.<\/p>\n

But the scenery offered lots of chances to stop and rest and LOOK at the amazing rock formations.\u00a0 First we made our way down to the bottom of the wide valley, and crossed the totally dry riverbed, which was covered with some sort of fine white substance that looked like salt.\u00a0 I didn’t taste it to find out, though.\u00a0 Probably it’s actually some sort of alkali.\u00a0 Then came the climb out of the valley, where there was one amazing rock formation after another, all different shapes and colors.\u00a0 Finally we reached a fence by some big rocks, where there was a “hiker gate” for us to get through.\u00a0\u00a0 Waiting for us there were 3 horses, who obviously figured “We know the drill on how to yogi stuff from hikers.”\u00a0 One of them, the brown one, was obviously the boss and was trying to get the other two to cooperate.\u00a0 No luck, though!\u00a0\u00a0 We just don’t have enough food on us to be sharing any of it with the horses.\u00a0 Poor things–they looked disappointed when we just elbowed past them and kept going.<\/p>\n

Fixit was having such a hard time with uphills that I realized we would never make it to Cuba right after lunch tomorrow as planned.\u00a0 I hope we make it there at least before dark, anyway!\u00a0 To add to the difficulty, it turned into a very hot day.\u00a0 We started hiking under umbrellas.<\/p>\n

Little did we know, though, we were walking right into a God-engineered chain of events.\u00a0 It went like this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \u00a0Because Fixit was so slow, in the afternoon another CDT hiker named Slapshot caught up with us.\u00a0 We stopped to talk, and he learned our trail names–“Fixit” and “3rd Monty.”\u00a0\u00a0We told him we were headed for the water cache 5 miles away, so he said, “See you at the cache” and took off.<\/li>\n
  2. When we reached the paved road where the water cache was supposed to be, we hunted everywhere and could not find it.\u00a0 We were desperately low on water.<\/li>\n
  3. So I resorted to trying to flag down passing cars to ask for water, and hooray, a guy named Smokey stopped.\u00a0 He was thrilled to be able to help CDT hikers, and gave us all the water we needed.\u00a0 He even gave us some bananas and trail snax, which we ate immediately!\u00a0\u00a0 We are hungry!<\/li>\n
  4. We hiked on, and only a couple of minutes later, there was the cache, hidden in some bushes.\u00a0 Slapshot was there, too, and looking serious.\u00a0 “There’s a note here for you guys,” he said, and held out a little yellow piece of paper.\u00a0 It said “Fixit and 3rd Monty–call your daughter Mercy ASAP.\u00a0 Urgent.”\u00a0 This did not sound good.\u00a0 But could we get cell phone service out in the middle of nowhere?\u00a0 Slapshot offered to help if needed, but we did get our cell phone to work, were able to call our daughter, and she told us that our other daughter’s husband had just died.\u00a0 Oh no! With our cell phone battery very low, we decided we’d better wait till Cuba (tomorrow) to call our other daughter.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If Fixit had not been slow, we would never have met Slapshot, and we would have walked right by the water cache without even looking in.\u00a0 We would never have seen the note.\u00a0 But Slapshot knew our trail names and he flagged us down.\u00a0 So even though we were horribly bummed about what had happened (it was not a total shock; our daughter’s husband had been battling cancer for some time) we were still heartened by the way God took care of the situation for us.<\/p>\n

    The rest of the afternoon we hiked as quickly as we could, trying to chew into the 33 more miles to Cuba.\u00a0 But we were slowed down by some (for me) scary steep, rocky uphills climbing up the mesa, and then once we were on top of that mesa, the trail went right by the edge of\u00a0a huge dropoff.\u00a0 I don’t like heights, and walking on a somewhat slippery, rocky trail right by a big edge was rough.\u00a0 I had to force myself to keep going, when what I felt like was “Aaaaaaa!\u00a0 I can’t do this!”\u00a0\u00a0 Near the end of the day, we had a very skimpy dinner.\u00a0 We’re rationing our food now, hoping to have enough to make Cuba tomorrow.\u00a0 But we did find a nice place to cowboy camp out of the wind\u00a0among the rocks, and spent time praying for our daughter and her 3 children.<\/p>\n\n\t\t