Day 197 (HDT 13)

Day 197 (HDT 13): 22 miles

I decided to take the time to fill up an emergency liter from the low water tank this morning, and I’m glad I did. There was another tank on Tarantula Mesa that had good reviews from past hikers roughly 3 miles away from where we camped. Since the first one was low, I was skeptical the second one would be better. Andddd it turned out to be bone dry.

So with dry pallets, we descended into Muley Canyon. Aside from kicking a small cactus and then pulling blood stained needles out of the top of my shoe, it went pretty well. The safest route down was well marked with cairns. And the final bit was a steep descent/controlled fall on loose soil to reach the bottom.

It was a cool-looking area, but how dry it looked made me fearful for the potential water sources ahead that we now desperately needed. In our thirsty stupor, we ended up hiking in the same wash for about a mile after we were supposed to climb out and turn off. So that also added another mile back.

Then we realized that today wasn’t really going to be following a wash for a long time. It was going to be a lot of climbing over washes and hills to cut across an area that is not convenient to cut across.

When we finally reached a point where a side canyon joined us and was supposed to have water, we were happy. There were cottonwoods and a lot of tall grass and reeds so a good sign for water. I crashed through some of the reeds to get a look at this canyon, and saw the water, but did not see a nice way to get down to it. We ended up going down a joining wash and reaching the other side but still couldn’t find a good way down. There was a steep rock face with a few divets in it that I decided I should be able to make it down on. When I reached the bottom of the rock, I saw it was about a 5 foot jump to the bottom. I could make it down, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it back up. And the Hayduke guidebook is not perfect, but early on they do a good job of emphasizing DO NOT JUMP DOWN ANYTHING YOU CANNOT CLIMB BACK UP!

But we needed this water and I figured it’d be alright. up. As a final precaution, I left my pack on the ledge, still reachable from the bottom, and jumped down. Once I got down, I realized I would definitely not be able to climb back up. It was too high. I filled up mine and Fancy Feast’s water bottles down there. We spent a good amount of time filtering water and drinking there, me in the canyon, her on the high ground. The water had a nice strong taste of iron so we definitely got our daily serving of that. And when it was time to climb out, I did so gracefully with the help of Fancy Feast who leveraged herself on the rock and helped pull me up.

By this time, it was past 2:30 and we had done like 8 miles on the route. We did about 4 more miles of slow cross country travel over hills, navigating around ledges, and descended into Swap Canyon. There were supposed to be potholes there, one of which was supposed to be nice. We saw the first big pothole which was known to be gross, so we passed it. The second pothole .5 miles later was allegedly much nicer. The only problem is that we passed the first pothole and then there never was a second big pothole.

By the time I was certain we passed where the second one should have been, it was over an extra mile to and from to get back to the nearest water. And it wasn’t good water. At the first pothole, it would’ve at least been easy to fill up bottles, but that was back farther. We only went back as far as we had to, which was to a little hole of water, only big enough to fill up about 1/3 a liter at a time. And the more we filled up, the more we disturbed the sediment and made the water we were getting worse. Fancy Feast thought it had a horrible alkaline taste, but I didn’t think it was too bad. We again spent A LOT of time sitting around filtering water.

But after leaving there it was actually easy walking in a wash without obstructions all the way down into Captiol Reef National Park where we met up with a road. We hiked this road 700 feet up the Burr Trail Switchbacks and into Lower Muley Twist Canyon. On a different note, I used an electrolyte packet with caffeine in it today to mask the strong iron taste of water, and y’all that take caffeine every day are on PED’s. That ain’t right.

Song of the day: wherever I may roam-Metallica