March 4th & 5th: The Canelo Hills

Day 3 & 4: Bad Water in Cowboy Country

We woke the second morning on the trail to learn (or recall) an important lesson: don’t camp in the bottom of a wash. All night we’d each felt a cold steady wind blowing through both our tents.

After breaking camp, we hiked through starkly different landscape. The mountains (and the border patrol blimp) were gone, and we now walked through low rolling hills. Dry hills. We started to notice water much more, and started to plan our days around where we could reliably find it.

We drank at some of the funkiest spots I could imagine. Because we filtered, we drank from anything: trickling streams, puddles, stock tanks or streams green with algae bloom. The process: stop, remove backpack (not easily done), fill filter bag with stream water, filter into larger drinking bladder, repeat until bag filled then fill yourself “until you sloshed”. We averaged about 4-5 liters of water a day.

We got less choosy about our camping spots. As long as it was roughly flat, off the trail and not in a wash, we flopped down. The first night in the Canelo Hills was actually pretty nice, but on the second night (in Red Rock Canyon), flat ground was impossible to find so we ended up camping amongst the thorn bushes by the creek. Our camp looked like those of the Chiracahua Apaches in the old photos of Arizona in the 1800’s – just not very cozy.

But the country was beautiful and we were getting close to a key goal: Patagonia the next day. As we crested the last of the hills and descended through Red Rock Canyon we knew we were only a few miles away from a pretty small town where a shower, soft bed and cold beer awaited us. The canyon widened and was dotted with small ranches, windmills and cattle tanks. Sleeping amongst the thorn trees wasn’t so bad.