Day 2 - Where did the trail go? (23.5 miles)

May 11, 2021

Trail Miles: 23.5 miles

Steps: 52,272

Had a good nights sleep which was surprising as normally my first night on trail I don’t sleep very well. Might had been my new air mattress.

Right as I was falling asleep last night I could see cloud lightning in that storm that had formed towards the north but I still kept my rain fly off because I could see that storm was headed east.

I did wake up in the middle of the night to pee and that was a treat to see all those stars.

Woke up around 5:20am, I wanted to wake up a little earlier but I was kind of tired and I’m not a fan of hiking in the dark. I started hiking around 6am where it was just light enough to see. I’m sure glad I waited those extra 30 minutes. The trail was almost nonexistent. You basically had to follow these wooden posts that were staked in the ground and at times blended in with everything else. Let’s just say I did a lot of backtracking those first 5 miles.

Those first 5 miles I was just hiking at the base of the mountain then once I started to head down towards the desert floor the posts were placed higher up and easy to see.

Got down to the road and the water cache around 9:20am. Where I filled up all my water bottles and drank as much as I could before heading back out into the desert like conditions. Before leaving I set up my umbrella which made a big difference for the next 2 hours.

Right around 12pm I found a somewhat shady spot to make my long break for the day. Turned out not to be such a good spot so around 2pm I got to hiking. Even though it was hot and don’t like to hike at that time of the day I knew 3.5 miles down the trail was a big tree with lots of shade. I had enough water and felt good so I left.

Once again I was hiking around the base of the mountains on an old gravel road the whole way to my spot with the big tree.

Finally made it through hiking during that hot part of the day and made good time to the shady spot. I ended stay for 2 hours so basically just broke up my 4 hour break into two 2 hour ones.

This was a much better spot to rest in the shade and I had cell service for the first time so was able to get out a picture on social media.

Around 5pm it was time to move on to my campsite for the night and next water source. There ended being some left over water jugs at this site so I decided to hike out some water rather than get out of the water tank. I glad I got water at that spot than the other.

The 3 mile hike was easy and as I was coming up on the water tank I saw lots and lots of cow all around that area. They didn’t seem too thrilled to see me. Since I had enough water to get me to the next water cache I decided to move on and not camp in the area. The only bad thing there weren’t really any other spots to camp. I kept running into more cows and just like before they had that look on their face for me to keep moving. Finally after walking 2 miles down the trail I found a nice spot.