Day 196 (HDT 12)

Day 196 (HDT 12): 22 miles

I knew it was going to be a big day of climbing. We still had over 5,000 feet to ascend up to the ridge of the Henry mountains over 11,000 feet. It was dirt road most of the way up to the top so it was slow and steady, but expected.

We filled up water at Crescent Creek on the way up. Soon after, Fancy Feast started to have some intense knee pain, but powered through like Phillip Rivers playing a full playoff game with a torn ACL.

When we reached the ridge, it was great. It was pretty hazy so we couldn’t see super far distances even though we were much higher then everything around, but it was still cool. The area reminded me a lot of Mount Taylor on the CDT, a tall mountain rising out of the desert wasteland.

The descent, which I was looking forward to cause I hate ascents, was much less enjoyable. At first, it was slowly making our way down the steep mountainside on rocky terrain. It wasn’t too bad. And I thought that since we road walked almost the whole way up, the descent would probably be mostly road walk too. How foolish of me for thinking the Hayduke would be convenient!

We then steeply descended to sweetwater Creek which was dry, but that didn’t keep it from being a pain in the ass. It was rocky, brushy, thorny, and about every other adjective that could anger me. I hit my head on tree branches. I painfully kicked rocks into my tender Achilles. I tripped. I ripped my shorts on thorns. Things on my pack kept getting caught in brush or thorns. And this was all before I got to the pour offs in the creek/wash. I was pissed off.

I climbed to the left of the first pour off and met up with Fancy Feast. We then spent probably 45 minutes, and who knows how much extra distance, trying to figure out how the hell to get back down into this canyon. We started going down a couple different washes before they either became too brushy to continue or turned into a cliff. Finally we found a steep hillslide of dirt we could make our way down on.

By the time we exited this wash and got back on a road, we were both pretty fed up with the day. But… since we moved slower than expected, we were still short of the Tarantula Mesa water tank we planned on making it to today. So we walked 4-5 more miles to get to a cattle trough that had nothing but glowing reviews from past hikers…….only to find that there was 1 centimeter of water in the bottom. If I wasn’t so defeated and apathetic by that point in the day, I probably would’ve been more upset, but it hardly phased me.

Fancy Feast really needed water, so she started soaking her buff and trying to squeeze it into a bottle. After having little success with that, I realized that I might accidentally have a scoop on me. I brought over my pringles jar and it worked to get a tiny bit of water out of the bottom and pour into a water bottle and repeat many times. Normally my Pringle cans just turn into a mobile trash can for tuna packets cause they’re so strong smelling they ideally shouldn’t be stored in a ziploc, but now the pringles can is dual function.

Also here are some fun facts about the Henry Mountains we went over today. They were the last mountain range in the lower 48 to be explored. Weird. And they’re home to one of the last free roaming wild bison herds. Didn’t see any unfortunately.

Song of the day: she builds quick machines-velvet revolver