March 3: The Huachucas

Day 2: The Eye of Sauron

We woke on our first morning on the trail and compared notes. What was the best way to sleep in a mummy sleeping bag in freezing weather? Lessons setting up a tent at the end of a long day? Already Chris is showing his superior organizational skills – while I am still fiddling with tent poles he already has his tent up, his sleeping bag and pad out and his stove organized and ready.

The good news, no more snow. Everything is downhill from here. The Huachucas are hard to hike but the views over Arizona and Mexico are endless. We descend just as rapidly as we ascended the day before. It’s a bit rough on our knees, quads and toenails, but we’re smart and we don’t push it. By the afternoon we’re in Sunnyside Canyon and the trail turns into a dirt road that follows a creek. Wild HUGE turkeys. The day before we had seen one solo hiker, but today we see no other human beings.

The guide had warned us that the trail was often used by refugees, with the most common activity at mile 8.5 above bathtub spring, exactly where we had camped. Although we later learned that other hikers had seen them (more on that when we get to Patagonia), Chris and I saw noone. We knew we were being watched however. In addition to the giant towers we had seen on the first day, the border patrol had a giant blimp that drifted over the mountains. At first we thought it was fixed over Miller Peak, but later realized that it moved slightly day to day. As we descended through Sunnyside Canyon the mountains disappeared, but we could see the blimp (and we assumed it could see us) the rest of the day. Chris dubbed it “The Eye of Sauron”.
By the late afternoon we’d descended almost all the way to the bottom of Parker Lake. The road turned into a deeply rutted two lane road, with rust red dirt that had been hiked for so long that it was soft like silt beneath our boots. In every way it seemed familiar to us – passing through the gates, the plumes of dust as we stepped, the smell of oak in the canyon. We stopped at a beautiful little wash off the main trail – about a mile from Parker Lake – and made camp for the night.