Tuesday, March 30
24 miles.
Long day. Slept mostly okay but around 4pm I was fucking freezing. Lots of drafts and couldn’t keep my head under my quilt without it getting too stuffy.
Packed up and noticed my bottles were partly frozen. Like an idiot, I didn’t sleep with my filter. I didn’t think it was going to get that cold and I distinctly didn’t take all the water out and sleep with it. Turns out it was going to get that cold and my filter froze. I kept it in my pocket to warm it up in the morning but an even bigger idiot I dropped it. Gave it a little shake to try to get the water inside out and I could hear the filter inside rattle meaning it’s probably busted. Water still comes out but guessing it’s not filtering anymore. So that sucks.
Jordan has his filter and has bleach and I have some emergency drops so I should be okay for this next section until Tropic where I’ll hopefully find something I can use. Kanab for sure has a gear shop but hopefully Tropic at least has drops or something. Jordan let me use his filter to clean up the remaining 4 liters I had and we didn’t get any more water until our cache so that was enough.
We were on the Death Ridge road for a while (not the actual name of the road, I don’t think) and to our pleasant surprise there wasn’t much of a climb. The morning was still freezing and most of the mud on the road was frozen which made for easier hiking.
We got to a section where we could go off trail on an Across Utah alt but decided to stick to the Skurka alt since it would be less off-trail travel. From the ridge we were on we crossed through a little pinyon-pine forest and then down the “gravely fins” of the ridge to a flat open area. I followed the path of least resistance down and it ended up taking me more west than the southwest I was intended to go. Which was fine it turned out because I ended up in a jeep road that connected with the HDT. Followed that road then finally reconnected with the official Hayduke Trail. The alt ended up cutting 30 or so miles off which I’m not complaining about.
(Un) fortunately, the Hayduke from the point where we reconnected was another dirt road. By this point I was tired of exposed dirt roads with not great views. Since we are ahead of schedule though, I was able to listen to music and podcasts which I haven’t done much.
I got way ahead of Jordan on the cross country section but we had planned to meet up at our cache near Grosvenor Arch. I was mostly up a big slog of a climb when a truck pulled up next to me and a white sunglassed bald dude in some BLM patches asked me if I was Jose. I freaked out for a second but then he offered me a ride. Turns out Jordan was in the truck in the backseat. They had stopped to ask him if he was okay and he thought they asked if he wanted a ride. He said sure, I’ll take a ride and they obliged. Not a bad way to get a hitch. I was less than 2 miles form the cache and had already done the climb but not having to hike on the dirt road for a bit was fine with me so I took the ride. Yellow blaze forever.
There were two dudes in the truck aside from Jordan. They worked for the BLM as range managers ensuring there wasn’t any cattle in the area. My heroes. We hadn’t seen any cattle since before Escalante so it seems like whatever they’re doing is working.
They dropped us off at our cache and we were able to dig it out. We had stashed food, maps, and 2 galloons of water. We took it all to the Grosvenor Arch Trailhead where we ate our canned fruit (thank fuck I didn’t leave the shitty heavy syrup extra cherry in this one), organized, and repacked our food.
The trailhead was pretty busy with a few cars pulling in to check out the Arch. The weird thing was that most cars only stopped for a few minutes which means they drove a long way to look at this one admittedly cool Arch for a few minutes or stopped along the way to who the hell knows where. In any case, we figured we could gift our bucket to one of them.
In one of my most courageous moments thus far, I asked a nice looking guy if he could take our bucket and to my relief he did. Two buckets down, two to go.
We ate some of our extra food and left one of the gallons for other Hayduke hikers. The slot canyon were are going into tomorrow and the rest of this section should have more water so we didn’t need the extra gallon after all.
We hiked a few more miles on you guessed it dirt roads until we found a semi protected spot covered in cow shit under a tree. Not the worst spot but still not a good site.
It’s supposed to get down into the 20s tonight which means a very cold night. I have most of my layers on, cinched my quilt tight, and tried to set my bivy as close to a tree as possible.
Tomorrow should be a fun day. We have a little mile or so warm up then we drop (literally) into a slot canyon. Just gotta make it though this cold ass night first.
Plants Outside 