Day 200 (HDT 16)

Day 200 (HDT 16): 22 miles

We started the day plunging into the cold water of the flowing Harris Wash just after sunrise. I tried to go spider monkey on the first stretch of the wash and avoid getting wet, hoping the water would dry up around the corner. But it didn’t. And it wouldn’t for a long time. We walked in the water for the first 13ish miles of the day. At first it was pretty damn cold and I couldn’t tell if my feet hurt or were going numb. I went in with my shoes and socks on, but Fancy Feast was a wild woman and went barefoot the whole way.

It was a cool area, but I really didn’t enjoy it. Aside from being a cat, and not liking being wet, there was also some serious quicksand. Aside from the instant sinking up to the shin which happened a lot, but Fancy Feast and I had some experiences of seriously going down and being engulfed up to our shorts. Even though I’m sure some quicksand expert will tell me it wasn’t dangerous, it felt scary.

Sidebar: if you died by that, would that be considered drowning?

As we were Lon the last mile or so of the flowing wash, we passed a few hikers going into it for a 4 day excursion. I was happy when the water finally stopped flowing and we got to walk in a dry wash before heading out on Harris Wash road which was also dry.

We took that up to Hole in the Rock Road. Now on Skurka’s alternate he has you take some more roads and washes to walk directly into town, but we had slightly different plans.

We hadn’t exactly planned for this section well. In Hanksville, I said it would be 65 miles to Escalante from there. That was incorrect. It was 65 miles after getting on the alternate, but that did not include the first 50 miles out of Hanksville before the start of the alternate. Because I’m a dumbass, we took food for 65 miles instead of 115. That’s quite a difference. And this problem was now exasperated by the fact that I couldn’t eat any of my peanut butter products. Fancy Feast gave me some of her food that I could eat instead, but it still wasn’t much. So for the last day, I had 3 bars to get me through the day. Our plan was to take Hole in the rock road up to highway 12, camp just shy of it tonight, and hitch in early in the morning. This would cut off about 20 miles on the alternate and get us into town sooner.

We were walking on hole in the rock road around probably 4:30 when I really started to get hungry and had one bar left to last me the night. I suddenly turned around to Fancy Feast and asked if she wanted to try to start hitching to cars passing us on this road, and try to get into town tonight. She said she didn’t care either way and left it up to me. While wavering back and forth a little, she reminded me that it was my 200th day on trail.

I had been joking that it was coming up and she better get me a present for it. She said this could be my present, and we started sticking out our thumbs to passing cars. Less than 5 cars passed before a nice young guy in a truck stopped and brought us into Escalante.

We got a tent site at the outfitter in town. I went to subway looking to feast on 2 footlongs, only to find out they were low on meatballs which is my go-to. This has happened at at least 7/10 last times I’ve been to subway. This is an epidemic going on that nobody is talking about. So I got a 6 inch sub there and 2 meals at a burger joint in town, before retiring back to our campsite to drink some coors lights and depressingly watch my Denver broncos refuse to play competent football. Thank you methstreams.com