After a weekend with Chinita and Emma in Palo Alto, I fly back to Phoenix to resume the 34th day of my trek. Mom and Dad pick me up at the airport and we drive to Flagstaff. We drive through town, past the old Route 66 motels, then north out on Fort Valley Road to the house my grandfather built, on land his father home-steaded. We drive past the split rail fences and cross the cattle guard. I’ve been coming to this house as long as I can remember.
In the morning Dad drives me 90m down to the Mogollon Rim ranger station where I will resume hiking. We drive south past Lake Mary and Mormon Lake. I’ll walk past this country in the other direction in a few days. When I get to Mormon Lake I’ll look for signs of Lockett Ranch. Both lakes and the land around them are now covered in snow. This will be a problem if it doesn’t melt. Dad drops me at the trailhead and I start hiking again at mile 500 of the AZT.
The day is nice. I walk mostly in dry weather with only the occasional rain but I’m surrounded by swirling boiling clouds of black, white and gray. The trail follows forest roads without snow but they are muddy. I see another thru hiker I first saw weeks ago outside of Oracle. For 3 hours David and I walk together. He was a Navy corpsman in the Gulf War and now walks as part of a veterans project. He saw good times and bad times he says. He is a good companion and the time flies.
In the afternoon David needs to stop and I walk alone. I listen to the Snow Leopard on my iPhone. I love the images in Mathiessen’s book about Tibet, love his attention to the small things, the waterfalls falling in the mist, the zen of solitude and quest. What most strikes me is the letter from his eight year old son asking him to come home. I’m struck by the beauty of the letter, but I also think of the selfishness of a man who treks for months at a time. The parallels to me are clear. Yet Clay wouldn’t write me such a letter. His is beyond that stage. He is a young man. It’s hard to get him to talk when I call home. His love is clear but I think he is setting his personal course in life and I admire him.
That night I hear rain on my tent but I’m warm and dry. The next morning sunshine. The first sounds are wild turkeys just before dawn, then the loud staccato of woodpeckers echoing. There is ice coating the water bladders outside the tent. The clouds from last night are gone, having emptied themselves on the forest around me. The sun glistens off beads of water hanging from the barbed wire fence and a fine mist rises from the meadow. It’s still too cold to get out of my tent so I sit half in my bag drinking coffee waiting for the sun to climb a bit more before I brave getting dressed and on the trail.
Many times the trail follows forest roads and then veers off and I miss the sign. When I realize the mistake I don’t backtrack, I blaze my own path and rejoin the trail a mile or two miles later. I have family history near here if I can find it. I walk past hunting camps, meadows and stock tanks with grass greener than I have ever seen. Tomorrow I will be just north of Mormon Lake and close to Coulter Cabin and Lockett Ranch, but most likely too far to actually see it.
By afternoon I run into David again. We talk as we hike. He says he was raised a Catholic but stopped after he came home. He says he looked at the people around him and thought they had nothing in common. He wondered what kind of God would allow the things he saw.
The Arizona Trail 