Part Eighty Two

     December 14th - 22nd              Grants, NM                                  (Go to Pt 1)
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Several springs showed-up on my map, so I picked one in the vicinity of where I thought I was and, for lack of any other corroborating landmarks, guessed at my location, but I didn’t like it.  Guesses out here got you lost.

As I continued across the mesa, I also continued to fret over the map.  With every land feature that appeared, I would stop and try to fit it into a place on the map but never with much confidence.  By mid-afternoon there was no more denying it, I was lost with nothing more than a general, southwest compass bearing to follow, which could easily send me miles off course.

​Being lost in countryside this vast was not just concerning, it was scarry.  I was crossing three to four miles of terrain every hour and as the hours and miles passed with nothing more to fix a compass bearing on, I could feel a queasy surge of anxiety and adrenaline build-up; if I were bearing off course then I was a good 17 miles off course, by now.

With the 250 map unable to verify landmarks, my next best hope was to run across another jeep trail but, so far, that hadn’t happened either; the afternoon was nearly gone and I was still in the weeds.

As the sun began to sink, so did my hopes of finding anything, anything at all, like water, a trail, or a landmark, until fear of being lost on the mesa eventually pumped enough adrenaline into my brain to take over.  I decided I wasn’t going to stop until I knew where I was, even if that meant walking through the night and into the following day.
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At that point, I still had about an hour before total darkness descended and the direction I was headed, right or wrong, was the direction I was headed - sooner or later I was bound to run across something.  With twilight descending, that something turned out to be a cow path.

Dusk fell into stary darkness, and while I had ahold of this cow trail, now I had to hang onto it in the dark.  More than once I had strayed off into the brush but managed to wrangle myself back, hounding the path until it finally descended from the mesa.

Nearing the bottom, I noticed a light glimmering in the far-off distance, literally a beacon in the night, and my spirits soared, vaporizing my fatigue into a jet-fueled moth headed straight for that light.

At 8:30pm I stood in a hardpan pasture about 200 yards away from a desert hut.  I still had no idea where I was but I felt pretty leery about going up there and knocking on the door to ask for directions, mainly because I’d probably scare the shit out of whomever was in there and everybody out here had guns.  I considered this, but I was almost out of water and needed to find out where the heck I was, so I cautiously walked up to the hut and knocked.

Click on the map for a larger image

Nobody answered at first, even though I knew there was at least one person in there because I’d seen him through the window, so I softly knocked again.  This time the door cracked open and a Mexican cowboy stood looking at me.  Showing the cowboy my map, I asked “Donde esta…a… road?”  The cowboy pointed out into the night and replied, “Dos millas” then was about to close the door when I hurriedly asked, “Do you have any water?”

The cowboy looked back blankly, “Water?” I asked again.  I decided to pull out one of my water bottles so he could see what I was talking about and turned away slightly to remove my pack so as to get at the water bottle when suddenly the door to the hut swung wide open and, when I looked back, the cowboy was standing in the doorway with a gun.  Behind the cowboy was another vaquero who also had a gun pointed at me, not street guns but like old fashioned, well-worn six-shooters.

This all happened in a flash when I had dropped my pack to the ground, and while I was pretty shocked, I wasn’t exactly surprised. “Whoa, whoa, whoa…”  I said, slowly raising my hands.  Then I pointed to my water bottle in the side pocket of my pack and again asked “Water?”  I couldn’t come up with the word ‘aqua’ to save my life.

“Ahhh… Aqua! Si!”  The guy then turned to his buddy and said something I didn’t understand but was apparently pretty funny because they both started laughing.  They put their guns down on a small table and the cowboy waved me inside, still laughing and saying “Si, si….”

I handed the guy my bottle and he took it over to a barrel in the corner of the room and began dipping-out water. While he was ladling water into my bottle, the two vaqueros continued to chatter back and forth, laughing at something that was obviously me - ‘estupido gringo lost in the desierto with no agua.  Hahahahaa!!’

After filling my bottle, the cowboy pointed out to where I would find a water tank and a place to camp.  I did remember “Gracias” then wandered out through a pasture to the water tank where I pitched-up my tent.
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I was wasted. I had covered 30+ miles in 14 hours and I was feeling every bit of it.  Too many miles had raised up blisters on my feet and caused an odd strain in a muscle running along my shin bone.  My body fatigue was so complete that once my sleeping bag was rolled out, that was it; no food, no Radio, no Hobbits, no nothing… lights out.

Temperatures fell hard during the night and in the morning I just laid around in the tent until the sun had a chance to warm things up a bit.  I felt like a train wreck and was lethargically packing away my gear when I noticed one of the cowboys walking across the pasture toward me.  He was carrying something in his hand that looked to be a shovel but as he got closer I saw that it was actually a long-handled axe.

I waved as he approached and he waved back, still with that shit eating grin on his face from last night, and that’s when it dawned on me that there wasn’t so much as a stick lying on the ground for an axe to chop at.  I glanced around for whatever it was this cowboy was planning to chop-up but there was only the metal tank, a few cows, and except for the fence posts, no wood anywhere in sight.

Well, ever since that bandito had walked-up on me and Craig in our camp back in Montana, I had felt a little vulnerable and paranoid that somebody might try to rob me of my gear while out in the hinters, and that’s exactly what I thought this cowboy was about to do - kill me for my gear and chop-up the body, why else the axe?
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And that’s about as far as my instant analysis of the situation had gotten when the cowboy walked into my camp, smiling that toothy grin of his, then past me to the water tank where he began to chop away at ice that had frozen over the top during the night.  Ahh… suddenly the world made sense again and I was able to go back to packing my gear while the grinning vaquero cleared ice from the tank.

After leaving the cowboy outpost, it took me a couple of hours to get down to San Mateo and from there, the final road grind into Grants.  Grants was a resupply stop-over that would have flipped around pretty quick had not my Mom decided to fly out to Albuquerque

The Lost Week
My Mom, Dona, taught high school photography and had just gone on Christmas break.  Not one to sit around the house, she had decided, pretty much spur of the moment, that she wanted to fly out to New Mexico to see me.

When I called home from Grants, she asked me what I thought about her coming out for a visit and I have to say, I was pretty surprised.  I mean, I kind of had this Continental Divide trip I was trying to finish but sure, Mom, come on out.

A couple of days later Dona flew out to Albuquerque and knowing that the accommodations and amenities in Grants would not be up to her expectations, I ended up on a Greyhound bus headed for the Albuquerque Sheraton Inn.  When at last we rendezvoused in Albuquerque, the first thing Dona wanted to do was go gift shopping, naturally.

That evening we rode the Sandia Tramway to a restaurant perched at the top for dinner.  Seated by huge, plate glass windows, we enjoyed a gourmet meal together with the shimmering lights of Albuquerque spread out across the valley below. The transposition of the desert I had just walked out of to this four star restaurant overlooking Albuquerque was mind blowing, as was the kaleidoscope of people.

While lingering over coffee after dinner, I gave my Mom a Christmas present that I’d pick-up at one of the gift shops; a silver bracelet set with a white stone, etched with a small, red cardinal. Dona loved cardinals and she loved the bracelet, and the entire evening really was a very special and unique moment in time together.

I ended-up touristing around the area with Dona for a few days, even renting a car to drive up to Santa Fe for a day, before boarding the bus back to Grants. And once I finally did get back to Grants, I had to work pretty hard to yank my head back in the game. Three nights of Sheraton Inn pillows and fluff towels, not to mention the Sandia dinning, had made coming back to Grants to face more desert hiking a real head spinner.
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When I went to pick-up my resupply box in the morning, it wasn’t very big.  Since I already had all of the gear I needed to finish the trip, there hadn’t been clothing or equipment to shuttle around, so the box only contained maps and food stuff; aside from studying the maps, preparations for this next section were minimal and the following morning I got an early start, walking several miles northwest of town to get beyond Grants and out to the Zuni Canyon.

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Go to Part 83

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The CDTC was founded in 2012 by volunteers and recreationists hoping to provide a unified voice for the CDT. Working hand-in-hand with the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land management agencies, the CDTC is a non-profit partner supporting stewardship of the CDT. The mission of the CDTC is to complete, promote and protect the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, a world-class national resource. For more information, please visit continentaldividetrail.org.

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