Friday, April 9.
20 ish miles.
Morning was freezing again. We’re back up over 8k and it definitely feels like it. Had a quick road walk to Jacob Lake and the restaurant were we got hash towns, bad hazelnut coffee, good bad coffee, and charged up our gizmos. Also procured a few extra chip bags because you can never have enough chips.
We opted to take the closed road near Jacob Lake down a few miles to were it got close enough to jump on the AZT. The road leads to the north entrance of the Grand Canyon but typically doesn’t open until mid May. We still saw quite a few cars though, mostly road crews and probably seasonal workers getting the campground down the road ready for the opening next month.
The road walk was mostly fine except for being loaded down with 7 days of food and a few liters of water. Jack didn’t cache so he’s been regularly doing heavy carries in addition to always carrying extra water and I have no idea how he does it. Being 23 helps I suppose. Jordan and I, old snowflake millenials that we are, are definitely not used to carrying this much weight. Neither are our packs which are too ul to comfortably carry big loads. We only have to do it for two days though so we’ll probably manage. We have to anyway.
Down the road Jordan found a basketball! It was NCAA regulation sized basketball in good condition with plenty of air still in it. Jordan couldn’t help himself, Indiana basketball fan that he is, and he decided to pack it out. Definitely made the road walk more fun. Back in Kanab we watched an ESPN documentary about Bobby Knight, the notorious Indiana college basketball couch, and the ball was too serendipitous to pass up.
After lunch, we were on the AZT for a while again, mostly hiking through a big burn area that Jordan said hadn’t been that big when he hiked it in 2018. It was again very awe inspiring. It was not too windy today thank fuck so I didn’t have to inhale a ton of ash and soot. We hit a few patches of snow but nothing too bad, just a little postholing here and there. My new shoes are actually performing pretty well. I was worried about the upper which seems very open up top but actually has a kind of liner underneath that keeps out most debris and snow. My shoes stayed fairly dry all day, a small victory. The burn area is also very exposed so a lot more sun hits the snow and melts it faster. We ran into an AZT hiker who had come up the trail all the way, not taking the road. He said there was still a lot of snow further down with lots of postholing. That’s pretty much what we had heard from the AZT hikers we ran into at Stateline.
We hiked a few more miles on the AZT stopping at a tank to get gross water then finding two caches on dirt roads a bit further down. At the second cache we decided to switch back to the road parallel to the trail. It looked like we would be getting back under tree cover which meant more snow and the road looked like it would be shorter as well to get to north entrance where we would head east to the Nankoweap Trail. I was pretty relived the others wanted to switch back to the road. I’m not a fan of postholing and the road seemed much faster. I plan on hiking the AZT maybe next year and might end up hiking those trail miles anyway so I’m fine with road walking for now.
The only problem was that because we were doing the road walk, we wouldn’t be going by the AZT water sources. The next water we could see on our water chart wouldn’t be until Nankoweap creek, 32 miles from where we were. This meant tanking up to full capacity, 6 liters. In hindsight, we didn’t really need to fill up that much but since we didn’t know what the water was going to be like we didn’t want to chance it.
We got back on the road and hiked past a ton of snow. The burn area ended and as predicted the snow came back. We did pass by a couple of water sources, little snow melt “lakes” (more like ponds) that we could have gotten water out of in a pinch. The old cache water was probably much better though.
A car also passed by us and the driver asked us if we were okay or needed anything. We asked her about the water and she said there was a spigot on at admin building down the road. Hurray. We’ll be able to fill up there if we need it tomorrow as probably the last water before the creek.
We didn’t hike much further as it got cold and dark fast around sunset. Quick dinner before finding a semi flat covered spot right off the road. The little embankment we’re up is a few degrees warmer than the road below, maybe enough to stay above freezing. It’s mighty chilly already and looking to get colder soon.
Plants Outside 