It’s so ridiculous it’s delightful. I am walking a two lane dirt road that stretches on forever surrounded by nothing but sage brush, sand and wisps of dead, dry grasses. And I have been doing so for hours. This is the CDT.
Up at the usual 5:30am. Check out the tent to see Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn are still lined up, although Venus is getting close to Jupiter. Slow motion sky display going on here that I would be missing if sleeping indoors.
Dallas is a little slower than usual here at the TLC Ranch. I have my tent down and ready to go while she is just crawling out of hers. I need another liter of water for the day so I take my pack over to the porch of the TLC homestead, fill a bottle from the Igoo container on the bench and sit down to clean up last night’s blog post and read the headlines. It is cold, right at the freezing point. So typing is tough due to shivering. I”m listening for Dallas to walk by, but not very intently because as I shiver and type she heads up the road without my noticing. After about 5-10 minutes, I really am oblivious to the time, I get up to see how her packing is coming along and she is gone. Opps. She is out there walking, probably thinking I am ahead of her. I flip on my PLB and start my watch and start after her. The road has a slight bend and some gently rises and falls. Soon, I see her on the horizon, about half a mile ahead. She stops at three miles for a bite to eat, looks behind and sees a figure coming up the road and wonders, “What the heck?” When I catch up we compare stories. No harm done.
The road stretches straight for miles and miles. Scrub grass and junipers surround us. I have shunned using walking sticks up to now, but yesterday I found they help add about half a mile an hour to my gait so I am employing them regularly now rather than carrying them. A creeping urge to go to the bathroom is haunting me. I look ahead and see the junipers are disappearing leaving only 18” tall scrub grass. If I want any cover at all for doing my business, now is the time. Good thing I got that out of the way, the next 5 miles is just scrub grass.
At 12 miles from TLC Ranch the road forks. We take the right fork and head up toward the hills in the distance, then up into those hills as the road ends at a trailhead. We are actually on trail again! It winds up gently into the hills and passes an abandoned homestead. The house made of logs and mud bricks still stands as does some of the corral. A cow pond no longer exists, it’s containment dam breached with a jagged gash cut thru it’s face, eroded deeply long ago. I’ve been listening to the book “Collapse” by Jared Diamond. He has been focusing on failed ranches and farms in Australia due to lack of water, poor soils, deforestation, climate change and salinization of soils. I wonder which of those factors ended this homestead. The locals I have met talk about how dry it is due to little winter snows. hmmm . . .
We reach a water source at mile 17, a cow pond. Faithful readers of this blog will remember my last experience with a cow pond, so you will understand my reticence to consider them a water source. This one is better. Cloudly, but not chocolate colored water. Little evidence of recent cow pies along the shore. Still, I have a liter and then some to carry me to a Solar well 8.1 miles distant. Off we go, heading into another plus 25 mile day. It is downhill and flat for this 8.1 miles. Although tired, my pack is somewhat lighter as I only have the one liter of water on board and only 2 days of food. The ragged and disfunctional windmill marking the well comes into view well more than a mile away. As I approach I contrast the two technologies at play here. The old Aeromotor windmill atop its tower. Below it a solar panel now doing the job of extracting renewable energy and putting it to work pumping water.
The land within 1/4 mile of the water source is striped bare of vegetation and the ground is blown clear of any loose soil. It is as hard as concrete. I drank my last water 10 minutes ago so it is with great relief I see a 20 foot diameter 18” high watering tank brimming with water. Motörhead, a thirty something chemical engineer from Bend, Oregon who has been either in front or behind us all day arrives and we begin filling our water bottles. I notice a 2” pipe has a constant flow of water pouring into the tank at maybe a gallon a minute, the result of the solar panel hooked to an underground pump. I fill all five of my bottles, dreading picking up my pack, but happy to have this life sustaining fluid in abundant supply. The wind has been howling all day, so much so that when walking the road it would blow my upwind walking stick in front of my feet causing me to trip. I had to consciously work to keep it out of my foot path. Here at the water source it is no different and the thought of camping with nothing to block the wind is not pleasant. We notice scrub junipers about 1/2 a mile away and head for them with our fully loaded packs. A thick clump allows us to pitch our tents in their wind shadow and soon I am in the desired position of the late afternoon- horizontal on the floor of my tent trying to straighten and elongate my spine back to its normal position. The wind continues to howl until about 8:30pm, then quiets down and quits. After that, I don’t know what happens because I am asleep. One great day after the next. Gotta love this life.
The abandoned homestead along the trail (real trail)
A little rough on the inside
Another view of the homestead
The cow pond. Doesn’t look too bad but I didn’t use it.
Old broken windmill with solar panel below operating the well pump. The tank is overflowing.
Dallas fills her bottles
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