Saturday, December 10, 2022
Laura and I drove separately, as is the usual case, from Petrified Forest to Picacho Peak, but we arrived within an hour of each other. We wanted to have a fire, and we were going to use wood that she had picked up near Petrified Forest, but it was damp wood, and we could not get it started. Then, I thought, why not check with the camp host to see if there was any wood for sale? I walked over to their trailer. The sign outside said, “Camp host – on duty” and I knocked on the door. There was no immediate response, then, after a couple minutes, a guy came out, and he said, yes, there was wood available. He looked like I woke him up, but he was very friendly and talkative. His name was Mark. I ended up buying two bundles. They were $8 each, I had to have exact change, and I only had six one-dollar bills and some ten-dollar bills. Anyway, the wood was seasoned and burned nicely. We had a great fire that night and, in the process, we put the wet wood close to the fire and dried it out, so we are in good shape with enough wood for a fire tomorrow night if desired.
We had one other out-of-the-ordinary activity that night. We made a bet on where on the horizon the big, beautiful moon would rise. Laura won the bet, for which I owed her $1.00.
December 11, 2022
It is much warmer today, 40 instead of 20, and the change from yesterday makes 40 feel comfortable. But 40 is not warm, it is still on the cold side of things. And it will likely be this way through the next phase of the trip. It seems to me that this trip has become “our trip”, rather than “my trip.” That’s how it feels. There are lots of pluses with that. Traveling and being with Laura has been great, helping me to feel so much more alive, so much more positive and looking forward to things in life, after the difficulties with caring for and supporting Mom and getting little support, but plenty of verbal and emotional abuse, from three of my siblings for several years. It is possible I will find myself back on this trip on my own at some point, though it looks like we’ll stay together most of the time through my return date to Danbury around 1/20/23. I had not imagined such a thing to happen, and it has been quite the wonderful surprise. We marked today with a special event, too. While at Petrified Forest, we went into a shop selling pieces of petrified wood and other rock and gem products and artifacts. I bought a little green lizard for Laura and gave it to her today, as it marked the 50th day since we had met up at Colorado National Monument. We named the lizard “Fifty.” There is a photo below, Laura sitting on a rock pointing to Fifty next to her.
It was a slow start to the morning. Well, maybe it is more accurate to say it was a late start. I was up a couple times in the night. And I ended up sleeping until 6:45. Laura was still in her car at 8AM, which is unusual. I went over at 8:15. I wanted to make sure she was okay. She was. She was sitting up, and she said she had been on the phone, had been awake for a while.
So, about yesterday’s hike. In the morning, Laura and I talked about the day. We wanted to do a hike and a bike ride. I wanted to do a hard ride, as well as ride some with her. We agreed better to do the hike, Picacho Peak, in the morning. We would go for a ride after that, in the afternoon. That kind of changed very quickly after I talked with Mark, the camp host, as he told me about the nature of the hike. He said to go up as we planned, on Hunter Trail, and then come down Sunset Trail, it is generally a 5-6 hour hike. He also mentioned the need for gloves. I mentioned Angel’s Landing at Zion, and he said this was comparable. This was all a surprise to me. But, Laura and I discussed it and agreed the hike was a higher priority than the ride. We left the camp site around 11:15, hit the trailhead at 11:45. We arrived on the peak at 2:09. I could not believe how long it took to go the 1.6 miles, but there was so much footage that required use of cables, and we stopped to take photos often. We stayed on top about 10 minutes, then headed down, and branched off on to Sunset Trail. It also had some very dicey cable-use sections while getting down to the valley floor, at which point it was a mostly flat 2 miles. All in all, it was about seven miles, and it took us from 11:15 to 4:45.
We walked 1.3 miles to the Hunter Trailhead. The trail started to gain altitude right away. There were a couple places with cables, very easy, to the point where I wondered why they were even there. I imagined this was going to be a very easy hike, and we would get to the top in about an hour. That seemed reasonable for a 1.6 mile hike. We did move slowly though, stopping to talk with some other hikers and taking several photos. So, when we got to the saddle, it had already been close to an hour. I thought we could still do the rest in 30 minutes. I had no idea what we were in for. The next stretch went down a steepish, single file, rock section about 40 yards long. It was necessary to use a cable. There was some waiting for others to come up. We stopped halfway down because there was a guy who looked out of sorts. We talked with him about ten minutes. Laura gave him electrolyte powder. He took it gladly and drank it down with some water. He insisted he was okay, and we continued. I did not count the number of cable-guided sections the rest of the way, but there were many. Some were single cable, others double cable, and some double cable with screens and/or plank boards for safety and stability. It was physically harder than Angel’s Landing, as evidenced by the aches I have today in my legs and shoulders and upper arms. Laura is a trooper. I mean she is there, so strong, energetic, with a can-do attitude. I told her later that evening that it was a not just a great hike because of the challenge of it, but it was also because I did it with her, she helped make it meaningful.
We met several people along the way. It was not at all crowded, but overall there were many hikers along the way. We met some of Santa’s elves on the way up, a man and woman who had on Santa hats. He was sort of an odd one, asking me Laura’s name and Laura my name, and when I did not respond he said I did not know her name. There was a guy at the start who was just finishing. He said he made it up in an hour. I thought that was reasonable, which confirmed my idea of how klong it would take us, but as noted I was way off. There were two runners coming down the trail at one point. They said it took them 35 minutes to ascend. Even now, I find that hard to believe. There were three guys at the top. They passed us on the way not too far from the top, so we shared time up there with them. They were riding motorcycles down from the Phoenix area and seemed to have not planned to hike at all. I don’t think they even had water. I heard them talking and saying it took them 62 minutes to get to the top. When they said that I started talking with them and one guy said it was the first time they were there, and he thought with knowledge of the trail and proper prep it could be done in 45 minutes. He seemed to be a fit guy, maybe in his 40s. One was taking photos of the other two, so I offered to take a picture of the three of them, and they took photos of Laura and myself. That is nice to have. There were three other guys we met that had hats on. They were more like our age. One hat was a Boston Red Sox, one said Mt. Kilimanjaro, one was had no lettering, just an icon of some sort. Two of them had hiked Kilimanjaro in the previous summer. One guy had a Telluride shirt on.
It was a great hike!
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