March 9: Kentucky Camp

Posted on by michaelhard

Day 8: A house is not a home

The night before was a little depressing. The cabin was fine – clean, dry but cold – but I felt more alone inside than I had come close to feeling on the trail. Something about being inside a well lighted place looking out on the dark makes a hiker feel cut off. Being in a cabin also suddenly made me miss my family more – no one to share it with. It didn’t help that I also couldn’t talk to my wife thanks to bad cell phone coverage: after an hour of holding the phone above my head on a hill above the camp in the gathering darkness we had given up. Frustrating.

 The next morning was different. The day was warm and sky clear. The sun streamed into the cabin. I heated water on the old hot plate in the kitchen and showered (i.e. poured it over my head). outside behind the outhouse. I had coffee and breakfast, sketched on the porch. Noticed all the quirks of the cabin – down to the penny embedded in the floor boards under the threshold to the bunk room.

 The hike out of Kentucky Camp was a blast. Within the first mile I passed three coyotes that scattered from the trail, every hour or two a covey of quail would break before me. I passed the 100 miles from Mexico mark sometime that day and was making good time. I passed other thru hikers (what they call people hiking the whole 800 mile trail) a few times during the day: Adrian from Prescott who wants to be a forest ranger; Pete, Esther and Judy from Alaska who laughed that the water doesn’t need filtering up there. Sometimes I walk a few miles with these folks, sometimes just take a few minutes to trade stories. Always a common bond, everyone content to be living in whatever moment is happening right now.

March 8: Santa Ritas

Posted on by michaelhard

Day 7: Snow

I wasn’t surprised that the rain had turned to snow, but I didn’t expect the colors.

 I opened the tent flap to see snow all around me. Great gobs of white on top of the rust red of the rocks and grey green of the juniper and pine. The clouds were thick and gray in the canyon below me, but with hints of white, pink and yellow where the sun was starting to peak through. I was warm and happy with coffee, cereal and the tangerines Mom had brought me the day before.

Everything was dusted with a confectioners sprinkle of snow. Only the trail itself stayed warm and dry. After two hours of hiking in a gradually warming morning, the first drop of melting snow hit the trail in front of me. The drops turned to clumps that fell from the trees, and soon the forest around me filled with the sound of falling water. By the time I got to Bear Spring, the creek was running higher than anything I had seen.

 I made great time – hiking downhill helped. Soon I was zooming along through mining country and grasslands at 5000 feet. No hikers, but saw more Border Patrol than I’d ever seen before. Some hikers had spotted 10 refugees on the trail the night before, and the agents were trying to track them down. I saw or heard at least a half dozen Border Patrol SUV’s searching. Finally a BP helicopter flew about 500 feet over my head and hovered over the rim of one of the canyons.

 The final miles were easy: through rolling hills, grassland and mining country. Today it was beautiful. A hundred years earlier the countryside was covered with mines. They used hydraulic mining – blasting hillsides with pressurized water and sifting the resulting detritus for gold and silver. The rusted pipes, mine entrances and dams were still there.

At 4pm, sun still in the sky but low, I walked into Kentucky Camp. A group of old mining buildings: one of which I stayed in. A caretaker who couldn’t hear (I had to get 5 feet away for him to hear me) gave me the correct combo and told me the nuns in the abbey down the road were singing at 5pm if I wanted to join him. Sounded good but I needed to dry my tent, make some dinner and get some rest.

March 7: Temporal Gulch

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Day 6: Rain Coming

Everything about the day was perfect, except for the storm coming in.

On March 7th Chris and I woke up, walked a few steps down the street to The Gathering Grounds for pancakes, then hiked out of town. Past the Wagon Wheel Saloon, past Velvet Elvis Pizza, past Patagonia High School and 7 miles up a dirt road to the Temporal Gulch Trail Head for a picnic lunch with my parents. They had made the 90m drive from Tucson to bring us fresh sandwiches and hear our war stories from the trail. Mom whimpered when we showed her pictures of one of our campsites – somehow it looked more desolate in photos. We talked, watched two cowboys drive a herd of cattle down the canyon, then said goodbye as they took Chris back to civilization and left me to keep hiking solo.

Steep hike up Temporal Gulch
Steep hike up Temporal Gulch

After they drove away, I hiked north through Temporal Canyon. My goal, spending the next night in a mining cabin in Kentucky Camp, was 16 miles away. I wanted to put in at least 4 miles in whatever last hours were left of the afternoon. The trail was a dirt road that climbed at what seemed an impossibly steep grade into the Santa Rita Mountain Range. Mount Wrightson started to loom in the distance.

By 5:30 I crested a saddle at 6000 feet and decided to call it a night. Wrightson loomed overhead to the west. I scrambled about 50 yards off the trail to a (somewhat) flat spot amongst the rocks and junipers, set up my tent and even got a little campfire going. It didn’t seem desolate at all – actually very cozy. My tent was well positioned to get the earliest rays of sunshine in the morning, assuming the rain forecasted for that night ended early.

Cozy fire before rain starts later that night
Cozy fire before rain starts later that night