I sleep in at the Comfort Inn – all truth in this advertising, a very comfortable bed. Margaret is heading to Phoenix so she can spend the night before an early start time to an ultra through the mountains. She tells me it’s a short one and I realize I move the same distance, about 70 miles though mine will take several days.
She picks me up on the way and we have a lovely talk along the curvy highway. Most of my walk in the Mazatzals are to our right and they’re big, but she assures me the steepness is not nearly as rough as I’ve done so far.
What a lovely, serendipitous meeting. Margaret is tiny but she must be fierce running these mountains. My new bright blue and silver closed-cell foam mattress is strapped to my pack like a long box. The pack feels lighter already. She also brings me salt tabs for this section, the last (so I’m told) of hard rocky trail.
Of course I immediately get lost. I know the trail is here somewhere but it’s barbed wire hell to find it. As I search around through the cat’s claw, a hiker suddenly appears as if sent to show me the way. I am very grateful for all these magic moments and easily find the way over the fence – someone has placed a rock and an overturned pot to climb up and over.
I’m actually needing to race the weather. Snow moves in Monday night at high altitudes. I should be on my way down at that point, but you never really know. I’m prepared and Margaret tells me to call if I get into trouble or need to take a side trail out to a road.
The trail begins surprisingly easy, not quite as littered with rock and rising very gently through oak, mesquite and bright red prickly pear. I’m moving so well it’s like a massage and I turn down the wrong road. I discover my mistake a bit too far to make it worth turning around and I join the trail again soon enough, perhaps wasting five minutes or so.
I vow to be more careful as I come to a creek up a steep canyon. I hear it running below before seeing and it never ceases to amaze me how much is in these dry canyons. Of course only a week ago snow was still on the ground up here.
It’s the first real up of the day back to balancing on rock and negotiating twists and turns. I smell smoke just as I cross the water and in the shade is a hiker with a cigarette. Joey is from ‘Flag’ or Flagstaff and kicking back on his sleep pad much like my new one.
He too sprung a leak and picked up a foam mattress that folds like an accordion. He points out it makes lunch breaks pretty nice for sprawling.
I fill up from a pristine pool fed by a waterfall. Fat black bugs dance on top but I avoid scooping any into my cup. I camel up too for seven miles or so to the next reliable source. About two minutes after I start, Joey flies by me. Ah well! “Hike your own hike.”
The canyon is dotted with sycamore, a very light green under peeling bark. Butterflies in yellow and blue flutter by and I see my first dragonfly, an iridescent blue with nearly invisible wings.
It’s a nice climb up to a saddle. Small-flowered wire lettuce grows in bunches along the way. I think about something Joey told me – the day it rained in the Superstition Mountains, it snowed on the higher mountains. Apparently it’s enough that several hikers have had to delay their start over 9,100 foot Mount Miller. I’m suddenly so glad those monsters are behind me.
I top out on a saddle and get a view of lump upon lump of mountain all very green, at least more so than I’ve yet seen. Some of the cliffs have exposed rock that’s a deep red. I cross a wash with red and yellow rock as if painted.
The trail suddenly becomes quite ‘cruisey,’ to use a word from my Kiwi friend Neal. I’m on a ridge with views way back to the four peaks. The ground itself is changing making for easier walking. It’s volcanic, sometimes in oddly eroded lumps, sometimes as if a flow has frozen in place and othertimes as jagged pieces of slate.
Much of it is easy on the feet and I feel like I earned this gentle stroll way up here amidst green mountains like ocean waves. But soon I cut down very steeply, zigzagging down ball bearing rocks towards a creek bed.
I could collect water, but don’t really need to. What I do need is my head net. The wind has totally died and out come the gnats. They don’t bite, but they land on my face, in my eyes and invariably get breathed in as I ascend again.
It makes things a bit warm, so it’s a trade off but I remember gnats so irritating in Northern California on the PCT and not having the net. It was torture and I vowed that tiny bit of gear goes everywhere with me from that day forward.
It’s steep, but only for a few minutes before I reach a saddle and go down into another gully again. This creek is getting close to the last water and I’m thirsty, so drink up and put some water with my noodles to soak for dinner.
It’s another climb to a spring and a camp spot, but I’m surprised how much the angle has relaxed. Sure, I still breathe hard going up and it’s work at the end of the day, but the rise is far more gentle than the big mountains I’ve already climbed.
I soon find a wee spot right beside the trail replete with a flat sitting stone. I grab two more liters at the spring and see Joey set up to cowboy camp. He tells me he was almost bit by a tarantula hawk, a vicious wasp that uses live tarantulas as a host for their eggs.
With that lovely image, I say goodnight and set up my tent. Just as I start to eat, John walks by! He says he’s getting better from the attack of giardia. I can’t believe he got antibiotics and kept hiking.
He sets up with Joey and I hear them chatter a bit until it goes dark. And me? Debuting my new mattress. A bit hard, but definitely won’t puncture. Let’s hope it’s a deep sleep and lots of happy miles tomorrow.
