Posted by 26.1 miles
Completely a marathon distance with a pack on and dodgey ankle was unthinkable at the start if the day but I felt good.
I was keen to position myself from some 15 mile days shorter days leading into Davilla Ranch tomorrow and Pie Town the following day. This meant walk and keep on walking for the day.
The morning was initially up hill for several miles but I find this easy in to cool off the morning. It was great to be off roads and onto a much longer section of single trail. It was soft underfoot through some taller pines.
I’ve found myself in a bit of a routine which gets the miles done. Leaving camp around 6am it easy to hike a solid 2 hours with refreshed feet and body. A 5-10 minute break for a coffee or second breakfast sees me through for any two hours. I’ll repeat this with another maybe slightly longer break and hike through until it feels like lunch time, anywhere between 12pm and 1:30pm. Lunch is a longer affair, where its time to find some shade, take the shoes and socks off to let the feet breath and rehydrate. The hottest part if the day seems to be after lunch and often the afternoon routine is broken into hour blocks. Depending on the terrain being hiked, how hot is it and how my body is feeling I could take a 5-10 minute break every hour.
Lunch spot could usually be anywhere, as long as there is shade. Today’s spot just happened to be a 12,000 gallon fire bladder. This isn’t usually here but hikes for days have been talking about as a bonus water source saving extra miles. Now every instinct in me as a firefighter told me not to take water from there, knowing how these things get used and abused and all the muck in them, but I was desperate. What I was most looking forward to was the opportunity to potentially use it as a large enough water body to find the slow leak in my air mattress.
I climbed the sides with an inflated mattress, reached the brim and tried to dunk it in. It was impossible to maintain my position that high up on the bladder while trying to retain my mattress in strong winds. I had the edge of the bladder tucked up underneath both arms but when trying to dunk my mattress the bladder edges would collapse and I’d get a thorough soaking. The thought was there and I didn’t mind being wet as it was super hot.
The afternoon was a tough affair, pushing up hills under a beating sun on backcountry roads. I’d exited the Red Line opting for the Blue Line that would take me to Davilla Ranch tomorrow and I was attempting to push as far as I could to minimise the the distance to the ranch tomorrow.
Each mile was a struggle in the heat and the road walking was an absolute grind. I keep telling myself the bulk of the road walking will be out if the way by the end of the next stretch.
The day was wearing on and I was aiming for the Valle Tio Vences campground, a free public land camping area with a toilet and picnic tables. There was also a small water cache 0.2 miles from here. Any hiking beyond that camp site would be a climb that I just didn’t have in.
My feet were hurting and body tired. 1.5 miles out from the camp a white pick up truck pulls up and the driver asks if I’d like a Gatorade or Coke. Of course the answer is yes. The driver, Mozey, gets out and presents a cooler with many cold options to choose from. Turns out he is the local bloke maintaining the water caches and just happened to be driving by. The trail provides again.
I polished off half a bottle of coke right there on the spot and waddled the rest of the distance to camp. It was only when calculating the daily distance hiked that I discovered I’d made a marathon distance. My biggest distance to date. Typically I’d be up at those distances already by my body just hasn’t allowed. I feel this ankle issue is going to cause me to take some time off trail to properly recover. Still no worse, still no better.
Mick Beckers 