Part Eighty One

     December 12th – 14th                Torreon, NM                               (Go to Pt 1)
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I was certain I had been on the main road and didn’t even think otherwise until now.  Was the trading post abandoned or was I following the wrong road… nah, I was on the right road, I think.  Eventually, it grew dark and by then I was almost convinced I had sidetracked onto some unknown road when, in the far off distance, I saw stationary lights that had to be coming from a house or building.
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Okay, cool.  I still had water, so there was no need for me to appear out of the darkness and scare these people half to death by knocking on their door, it could wait until morning.  I found a place in the scrub to throw out my sleeping bag, leaving the tent packed, and again fished through the lunch sack for something to eat.

In the morning I walked the rest of the way down to Torreon where there actually was a trading post and where I was able to refill my water containers.  At this point, I was going to have to leave the security of the road I’d been following, the only road in north/central New Mexico with any vehicles on it, to continue across the plains using primitive roads and unmarked, jeep trails.
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Again, water was the big question mark.  Where the heck was I going to find water out there?  A Native in Torreon told me water could still be found up on the Chivato Mesa but judging from my map, that mesa would take me a day and half to reach.  I could carry enough water to get out there but if I didn’t find water up on that expansive mesa, I was going to be in some very thirsty trouble.

​I left the Torreon Trading Post mid to late morning, heading southwest on a dirt road that was actually shown on my 250,000 map.  Although the terrain required no special attention, I wasn’t daydreaming, I was making note of every land feature out there and checking what I saw against the map.  At first, the terrain, the map, and the dirt road all made sense until I came to a fork in the road.
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The map showed a fork but I didn’t think I was far enough south yet to be at that junction.  Still, there was only one fork shown, so I figured this must be it and took the easterly fork as the map showed.  I continued along this now diminishing, truck trail for at least an hour, feeling like something wasn’t quite right.

Around 4:30 in the afternoon I spotted a small, adobe abode sitting off in the distance and an indigenous family began to wander out when they saw me coming up the road, curious as hell.  There were elders, and parents with young kids, and I’d bet a silver dollar this was the first time they’d ever seen a white boy with a backpack out wandering around in their neighborhood.  And yes sir, they were sure curious about that.

As the kids gathered around, chattering excitedly in dialect, I tried to communicate with their parents in Spanglish that I was trying to get out to the Chivato Mesa and pointed to the mesa on my map.  “Donde esta…la mesa.. Chivato Mesa?”

Click on the map for a larger image

The guy, and I’ll call him Chaco, knew right away how to get to where I wanted to go and the way I was currently going wasn’t it.  The fork I had taken 3 miles back was all wrong and I was well on my way to nowhere.

Chaco quickly became invested in my quest for the Chivato Mesa and insisted on loading me, along with the kids, onto the back of an ancient, flatbed truck to take me back out to the fork in the road where I had gone wrong.   Turns out, the fork I needed was still a couple of miles further south.
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Chaco dropped me back at the fork, handing me a water container from the truck to top off my water bottle, and pointing at the map to places where I could possibly find water sources out ahead.  What he was saying made perfect sense to him but remained mostly a riddle to me since I didn’t speak the language.  What I did understand was that there was water out there if I could find it.

I camped that night atop the San Luis Mesa where the vastness of the landscape, and the enormity of the sky were overwhelming.  I’d set-up the tent in case of wind but it was a calm, mild evening, so I laid out in my sleeping bag watching stars fill-in the sky. Not since Wyoming had I felt like such an insignificant, speck of nothing and that evening on the mesa I was struck by a deep sorrow of loneliness.
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Craig, my missing camp mate, floated into my thoughts in a sad, almost broken-hearted way.  I missed having Craig on the trail and around camp at night; he should have been here in New Mexico with me and I was really bummed that he wasn’t.  From there, my sad sack, melancholic mood only spiraled downward to pining over a lost girlfriend from high school who had dumped me just before graduation my senior year, so que the crying violins for that one.
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By the time I could no longer keep my eyes open, the sky was so thick and so deep with stars that it fostered the illusion I was camped in space, among the cosmos.  I don’t know how many square miles of stars I could see from my sleeping bag that night but it had to have been in the thousands.

Sunrise across the desert in the morning was spectacular because of deep, red clouds on the horizon, signaling an eventual end to the vacation weather I’d been enjoying so much.  Still, temperatures were mild enough for me to start out across the mesa in a t-shirt but later, as expected, temperatures began to fall in sync with a cold wind that had kicked-up.
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Somewhere out on the mesa, the two-track I’d been following simply vanished into the brush and I was left to figure the rest out on my own.  I dropped from the mesa into a shallow arroyo, then continued down the wash until a faint two-track appeared, eventually leading me out to a spring near the base of the Chivato Mesa.

My map showed the spring but dumb luck had found it. I would have preferred superior pioneering skills to luck for locating water, but luck was gold, too.  After filling my containers, though, I was reluctant to leave.

Given where I was, water meant security and I found myself loitering by the spring, actually getting scared to leave.  Luck had worked-out for me this time but I didn’t like the idea of dumb luck being in charge of finding my next water source.

While I was standing there, I noticed my blue jeans weren’t putting up much resistance against the biting, December wind and in the distance I watched as dirt billowed-up to blow across the plains, causing me to wonder if it would be okay to make camp.

Whereas I had started off the morning in my t-shirt, I was now wearing a hat, wool shirt, and down jacket, so, as lame as it was, I used this cold wind as an excuse to go ahead and make an early camp.  Besides, I hadn’t checked-in with the Hobbits for a few days, so reading in the tent, out of the wind, seemed totally justifiable.

The next morning I was up at dawn, packing away my tent under the last, flickering stars of the night sky.  Sunrise broke into a calm, clear morning just as I was starting-off my day on a jeep trail running along the bottom of the plateau.  My hope was to cross over the Chivato Mesa and get down to San Mateo by day’s end, and San Mateo was a long ways off.
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The Chivato Mesa rose up massively from the desert floor and after a couple of miles, the trail veered away from the arroyo to go up a draw, becoming a ridiculous, 4WD track leading out to the top. On top was another vast, high plains desert with 26 miles I needed to cross but also 300 square miles upon which to go astray.

Looking out across the mesa, I checked my 250,000 map to see if anything on the map correlated with what I was seeing on the ground, but the land features were too small to show-up on the map, and the jeep trail, now just two ruts wandering through sage, was another thing that didn’t show on the map.
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With ever decreasing confidence, I continued to follow the dirt ruts for nearly 10 miles out onto the mesa, watching the tracks dwindle with every mile that passed until they finally vanished into the weeds at a small spring, which I met with both relief and alarm.

I’m a guy who requires a lot of water to run properly and the climb to get up onto the mesa, followed by the hours spent getting out to the spring, had sucked-up a worrying amount of my water supply, so being able to refill my hollow containers from the spring was a tremendous relief.

The alarm was going off because I had been relying on this dead-end jeep trail not to leave me stranded out in the middle of the mesa, only to have it abandon me with no more tracks left on the ground to follow.  Adding to my angst were the lack of land features large enough to show on my map and an almost nauseous uncertainty as to my actual location.

The map did show a number of springs scattered across the mesa, so I picked one in the vicinity of where I thought I might be and, for lack of any other corroborating landmarks, guessed at my location, but I didn’t like it.  Guesses out here got you lost.

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Go to Part 82

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