Cache me outside.
Spent a few days running around to different stores gathering everything we were going to need for the hike. Food, more food, shovels, buckets, random gear, and more food. Also did a little bit of outside stuff, including a practice hike for Jordan’s new backpack on a dope trail a ways away from ABQ. Also did a little flat running around Jordan’s place and on the Rio Grande path. It was okay, just not the most scenic.
The hiking and running wasn’t too strenuous but I’m definitely not feeling in the best shape. Couple of short steep climbs had me nose breathing heavy. Could be altitude or the covid or the just being out of shape but it doesn’t bode well for having to do that but with a much heavier pack.
The most difficult part of planning ended up being trying to figure out where the fuck we were going to leave Jordan’s truck. We had initially figured it wouldn’t be too tough to find a spot to leave it parked in Moab but that was wrong. We spent days calling places and making posts to try to find a place. We also couldn’t figure out how we were going to get from St George, the presumably end of our hike, back to Moab. All the car rental places we found were all out or wouldn’t let us take a car from St George one way to Moab. After calling a million different places, we found a storage place in Moab that had one opening for the truck. So the plan was to drive to Jacob Lake and leave caches from there back to Moab then leave the truck in Moab and start hiking. Which is exactly what we did.
We finished packing all the cache buckets which took a stupid amount of time and loaded them up into Jordan’s truck.We got a late start to driving Arizona since it took us all morning to figure out the plan and confirm the storage place. The drive out was interesting. We drove through some reservations which asked us to be out by 5pm. The native communities have been especially hard hit by covid and it’s understandable that they wouldn’t want people to linger too much on their lands.
We drove for hours, listening to podcasts and music and talking. When we initially planned the HDT one of the things we most looked forward to was the caching trip and for the most part it lived up to our ideas of what it was going to be like. Just two friends driving across the beautiful desert landscape being bros, doing bro things. One bummer was that we didn’t actually get to climb like we had initially wanted to. In hindsight, we definitely could have but I think we were both pretty eager to get hiking, especially after the days of planning and packing, so we skipped it for now. I did bring all my climbing gear and hopefully we’ll get to use it at the end of the hike.
The first night we made it to a spot not far from Jacobs Lake north of the Grand Canyon. It was already immensely beautiful and it did make me a little more excited for the hike. Our first cache spot was on an AZT trailhead near Jacobs Lake. There was still snow and the ground was hard to dig up. We argued a bit over the best spot to cache our food. Jordan wanted to leave it in an AZT hiker box but I thought we should bury it away so we wouldn’t crowd it. Digging up the ground was a pain but we eventually managed to stash our caches.
From there we drove all over southern Utah dropping off a few more caches. We slept in a BLM spot outside of Escalante, a cute little southern Utah town that seems outdoor focused. The landscape was amazing. So many sandstone canyons and plateaus all around us. Astounding sheer red sandstone walls. We drove on highway 12 for a long time, a very scenic highway that travels a good length of the most impressive areas of Utah.
Our last caching night we slept outside Canyonlands. There were so many iconic towers that I was really regretting not having enough time to climb. Not that we could have anyway since most of those were above our skills or required a lot more gear than we had.
In total we had to drive around 1,200 miles from ABQ to Moab and the different caching locations. There’s a lot more to describe but it’s time to get to the hiking.
Plants Outside 