Day 33: 19 May, 23.4 miles today, 551.7 miles total, Starrynight Ranch, NM
We’d first met Leaves and Hombre at the hostel in Silver City. A cheerful hiker couple with maybe just a couple of years on Sean Meadow and me, we’d gotten along with them from the start, and had always been happy to run into them in town or at camp. We lost track of them in the stretch after Pie Town, but as I was walking the last interminable mile into Cuba, I got a text from Sean Meadow saying that she’d met up with Leaves at the McDonald’s. Not long after I made it in and had started wolfing down my deluxe* chicken sandwich, Hombre showed up, hoping to make use of the restaurant’s free wifi to download a few local maps. While the rest of us at that point were still trying to figure out a way to get to the next stop along the trail before the National Forest closures, he and Leaves were working out a route to road walk to Chama.
When Sean Meadow and I reluctantly came to accept that a Chama road walk was the least worst option we could take, we met up with them—once again at the McDonald’s—to compare notes and decide on the most likely places to go for water and camping in what I was now calling the “Hombre Alternate.” Most hikers were trying to find rides farther north; a fortunate few were able to lock down transportation that day or the next, some would have to wait until the weekend or longer, and some just stuck out their thumbs and tried their luck hitch-hiking. Almost nobody else seemed interested in walking the lonely state highways of New Mexico.
So it was that the only hikers we saw after leaving Cuba were Leaves and Hombre, along with a fast young fellow we knew who was going to try to make the distance in just over two days. I did hear about a possible crowd somewhere behind us when a man in a Jeep pulled up and excitedly started asking me what exactly the deal with all the hikers on the road was, and where we going, and what’s a continental divide trail, and really, you’re all really hiking to Canada?? He peppered me with rapid-fire questions until oncoming traffic prompted him to drive on. His enthusiasm had been infectious, but I never did see all the other hikers he’d said he’d seen walking behind me who had so piqued his curiosity.
The road out of Cuba was a busy four-laner, choked with semis and trash, and walking that close to that much traffic was indeed uncomfortable—but we did have a shoulder wide enough that we’d have felt spoiled had we ended up on that road during our bike trip. As the day went on, we turned onto smaller and smaller roads, until we only had to step aside for the occasional vehicle. All in all, the day’s walking wasn’t so bad.
We’d made arrangements to camp at ranch that typically housed tourists looking for an authentic Wild West horse riding experience—partly so we have a safe place to sleep, and partly so we would have a guaranteed source of water in the morning. A mile down a dusty dirt road and set amid green, sculpted hills, the Starrynight Ranch was the perfect haven for the evening. The owner was very hospitable, making sure we had everything we needed before we retired to our tents. As Leaves, Hombre, Sean Meadow, and I ate a cheerful camp dinner around the patio table, it seemed crazy that no other hikers had done as we had. We were off the official route, sure, but that was part of the adventure—and so far, at least, it was going better than we could have hoped.
*meaning, apparently, that it came with lettuce
Day 34: 20 May, 26.9 miles today, 578.6 miles total, Cooper’s El Vado Ranch, NM
In what was becoming an unfortunate pattern, the wind picked up/shifted direction around midnight once again, violently shaking the tent and making a general racket and making it very difficult to sleep. The tent seemed extra flappy, which I attributed to the angle the wind was hitting it, but in any case the noise it was making was loud as hell. While I was busy praying for the serenity to accept this thing I could not change, Sean Meadow went outside to pee and discovered that the wind had pulled two of the stakes out of the ground. She quickly hammered them back into place, which stilled the tent considerably. Apparently I should have been praying for the strength to change what I could, but I had also forgotten to ask for the wisdom to tell the difference.
After a night of fitful, uneven sleep, we packed up and headed out one by one, each accompanied all the way back to the highway by Luke the cowdog. Luke, who woofed loudly and insistently when herding cattle, was a giant of dog, but was exceptionally relaxed and gentle with humans. He walked Sean Meadow out to state route 112, and was on his way back when he found me a turned right back around. It was good to have company walking through the scrub, but when we got to the cattle guard marking the edge of the property, it was time for him to head home. I figured he wouldn’t follow me over the guard—I hate walking over those things—but when I turned around he was right behind me.
Even if I were the sort to steal a dog, they’re even less suited to thru-hiking than humans. Luke couldn’t go with me, so I pointed back the way we’d come and gently told him, “Luke, you need to go home.” He hung his head and slunk back across the cattle guard, making me feel like a real wretch in the process. Every time I looked back he was standing just on the other the side of the guard, watching me walk away until eventually we couldn’t see each other anymore.
He did the same thing with Hombre and Leaves.
The day’s road walking was fine until around midday, when NM112 suddenly and unexpectedly became a dirt road. For 16 miles, we had almost no traffic, and the softer tread was a great deal easier on our feet than asphalt. We also met a friend of Leaves and Hombre who had had to get off trail for a bit, and had, with her husband, left us a small cache of water about halfway through our day. We’d each spoken to them briefly as they’d passed us to set up the cache, and they’d offered each of a list of treats they had on hand—sonic addition to the water, they also left an apple each for Sean Meadow and Leaves, cookies for Hombre, and a beer for me. They were both incredibly nice and enthusiastic.
The scenery on the Hombre Alternate was honestly a lot better than any of us had expected, and the dirt underfoot was a real treat—there had been sections of the official CDT that hadn’t been as pleasant. But it was still kind of a slog. The hardest part of road walking is that it’s kind of boring, since you can pretty much always see where the road is taking you. By the time we crossed the dam at the south end of the El Vado Reservoir, I was more than ready to set up camp in some easily ignored corner of the nearby RV park (pretentiously marketed as a “ranch,” despite the complete absence of any such establishment’s defining qualities), climb into the tent and call it a night.
Day 35: 21 May, 26.5 miles today, 605.1 miles total, Chama, NM
We awoke to the gentle plick plick plick of a light, early morning rain. It was the first precipitation of any kind we’d seen in New Mexico, a state in which we’d only seen noticeable cloud cover twice in over a month. It was the most concrete evidence we’d had yet that we were leaving behind the dusty arroyos and scrub brush ecosystems for an altogether different sort of hiking.
CDT hikers talk about Colorado as if sits on entirely separated plane of existence—a different world, as unconnected from the desert plains and mesas of New Mexico as Jupiter or Mars. For most NOBOs, this sudden shift is only partially true: just past Cuba, the CDT bends eastward, clambering over the Sierra Nacimiento and into the Tusas Mountains, the southeastern arm of the San Juan range and the place where the trail climbs onto the spine of the Rocky Mountains. In the last 150 miles of the state, the character of the CDT evolves from a meandering track through the desert to a pathway through the Rockies.
But we missed all of that, having been forced by the fire closures to roadwalk almost 80 mostly-flattish miles from Cuba to Chama. We actually wouldn’t enter the Rockies until we’d roadwalked out of Chama and into Colorado, rejoining the trail at Cumbres Pass. For us, that transition really was going to be almost as stark as leaving one planet for another. We’d only traded dusty trail in Cuba for dusty road and had spent those miles walking through the same exposed, windy, sandy terrain as we’d seen since the monument at the Mexican border; the only sign that anything different was coming was the weather.
Despite the smattering of rain we’d gotten while still lying in the tent, the first few miles out of Cooper’s Glorified RV Park were dry, but were by far the coldest daylight hours we’d had in New Mexico. I’d started in my regular hiking shirt, but had to stop to dig my puffy jacket out of my pack. I could imagine how Sean Meadow—notoriously more sensitive to the cold than me—was faring up ahead. After an hour or so, however, the wind shifted and the sky opened up. It wasn’t rain; it was sleet, and it was freezing. The next three hours of road walking would be defined largely by the bursts of mingled water and ice that kept shooting out of the sky, all the way into the tiny blip-on-a-map called Los Ojos, where we would join Hwy 64 north toward Chama.
For me, the entire raison d’etre of Los Ojos was the Family Dollar—and judging from the massive line of locals queued up to buy a single drink and a microwaveable meal, I wasn’t the only one for whom that was true. The sun came out while I was inside, and I spent a blissful few minutes sitting on the curb in front of the store, soaking up the sunshine, working my way through the pile of snacks I’d purchased, and fielding questions from the townies re: all the hikers that had appeared on the roads in the last few days. As I left, I felt a little gurgle in my belly, but I ignored it. It’s probably nothing, I thought—not worth turning around and returning to the Family Dollar, which in any case surely wouldn’t be the last bathroom for the next 13 miles.
Well, I was wrong, about pretty much everything. Not only that, but there proved to be no good places to hide off the road to dig a quick cat hole. There was literally nowhere to go during the entire length of 64 from Los Ojos to Chama, which left me walking the foot-bruising asphalt as fast as I could in desperate effort not to shit my pants—a distance that took me just over four hours of clenched-cheek determination. I saw my very first in-person prairie dog on the stretch, and heard dozens of the territorial little varmints squeak aggressively at me from their holes as I passed like angry dog toys. I passed by a road-repaving project that reduced traffic on the highway to one lane for miles and consisted of a bizarre train of conjoined tractor-trailers hauling propane, raw asphalt, and a series of strange machines that belched steady jets of bright orange flame, massive plumes of acrid smoke, and a simply ungodly amount of noise onto the road. I passed an actual ranch hosting a high-schooler’s graduation party, the live band’s rendition of “Brown Eyed Girl” clearly audible from the road. The clouds opened up a bit toward the north, revealing a hint of the mountains we’d climb into once we left our hotel. But I couldn’t spare these wonders any more than a passing notice, as I remained focused on the toilet that waited for me in town.
I even turned down a cold soda from a carful of tourists outside of town—one of whom stopped me on foot five minutes from the hotel where Sean Meadow was already checked in and showered to say that he’d never seen a hiker pass up an offered refreshment before. One of our friends called to me from the porch of their hotel. I didn’t have time for any of them.
I made it. I was convinced for several miles I wouldn’t, but in the end I did. And when I finally was able to look around and appreciate my surrounding, I found that I was in an extremely charming hotel in an extremely charming town at the feet of some truly spectacular mountains. We had arrived in Chama, a delightful little tourist town nestled beneath the San Juan mountains. Now we just had to figure out what in the world we were about to hike into from here.
Day 36: 22 May, 0.0 miles today, 605.1 miles total, Chama, NM
There were hikers everywhere. As the Forest Service had shut down the northernmost 200 miles of the CDT in New Mexico, the trail town closest to the Colorado border naturally became the point toward which most hikers were inexorably funneled, whether they snuck in after the closure, walked the roads from Ghost Ranch or Cuba, or got a ride from anywhere in New Mexico. Anytime I looked out the window of our hotel room, I’d see another hiker walking down the street; anytime Sean Meadow and I left our room, we’d run into someone we knew whom we hadn’t seen in dozens or hundreds of miles. Locals on the street, at the grocery store, in restaurants all wanted to know “what’s up with all the hikers?” and every local business was overwhelmed by this swarm of voracious, insatiable, pack-toting locusts. But it was also kind of fun.
Few people were looking to hike out right away: most of us were now ahead of schedule and weren’t in a hurry to hike into the cold. Some people were waiting for the weather to warm, as it was forecast to do in three days. Sean Meadow and I had to wait for the post office to open, as we had gear waiting for us in this town, but we were also happy to spend some extra time lounging in our comfy oversized hotel suite. The San Juans weren’t going anywhere, and for the moment, neither were we. Chama had become a (very) low key hiker vortex, and we were content to take a few spins before heading out into the high passes of the rugged Rocky Mountains.
Day 37: 23 May, 13.0 miles today, 618.1 miles total, Chama, NM
Sean Meadow had the idea in passing, but the longer it hung in the air, the better it seemed: instead of doing the 13 miles roadwalk necessary to reconnect our footpath with the red-line CDT the day we left Chama, getting us back on the trail proper only after a half-day’s walking, we could do it the day before and get a ride back to the hotel. That way, at least, we’d be better set to start navigating the notoriously difficult section that lay before us and hopefully make it into the next town before the post office closed for Memorial Day weekend.
The two-lane highway from Chama to Cumbres Pass made clear what we’d already suspected: the terrain in Colorado would be a world apart from the dusty slog through the desert plains that had heretofore defined the CDT for us. The three miles we walked in Colorado especially were like a cartoon rendition of a sub-alpine paradise, where the sun shone strong and bright through the mixed pine and aspen, and slowly dried the morning dew from the verdant, grassy valleys as snow-dusted massifs rose to prominence in the distance. The sound of burbling creeks was everywhere, as clear, clean water—water!—cascaded from stone outcroppings and ran through furrows in the rich, brown earth. Birds sung from seemingly every tree, and herds of elk frolicked up and down the mountainsides, coquettishly shaking their two-tone rumps at us as they bounded off into the forest. It was like walking into a hallucination hosted by Walt Disney.
The thing I noticed upon our return to Chama was the smell of the lilacs, planted in almost every yard (at least in the vicinity of the post office), and all in full bloom at once. Typically a delicate odor, the town was a riot of the soft, saccharine scent, which was still pleasant despite its overwhelming intensity. It was like being carried on a cloud of sweet perfume to pick up the package holding my new hip-belt, snow traction gear, and my lightweight 20° quilt.
I spent the rest of the day hustling to wrap up my town chores so I could ready to take on the San Juans in the morning, and I wore myself out walking back and forth to the PO to mail some old gear back home, picking up some last-minute supplements to my food bag, washing my socks in the hotel sink with the bottle of tiny Tide detergent Sean Meadow had picked up at the Family Dollar, etc. I was starting to stress that I wouldn’t be able to get everything done, but when some friends asked if we wanted to grab a bite to eat I didn’t hesitate, since I was also getting pretty hungry. We discovered after meeting up that the restaurant we’d agreed to offered drive-thru service only, and it was while we were walking in the pickup lane that they mentioned that the weather for the following day looked…cold. And snowy. And bad. They’d be waiting an extra day before heading back out to the trail.
We checked the weather out ourselves when we got back to our room, and found ourselves lead to the same conclusion. It’d be one thing if we were already hiking and had to find a way to cope with a snowy night in the teens while in the mountains, but there wasn’t really a good reason to walk right into one, when the weather was supposed to improve dramatically the very next day. We’d be in Chama for one more day; at least this time all the walking would be done. I could finish my chores and relax before we hiked into this madness.
Day 38: 24 May, 0.0 miles today, 618.1 miles total, Chama, NM
Having scrambled to get as much done as I could the day before in anticipation of hiking out in the morning, I found myself with the rare prospect of a zero day during which I had only a few minor things left to do besides actually, like, resting. After stopping by the front desk of the hotel to add a night to our stay and then making effective use use of the Cumbres Suites’ well-appointed continental breakfast, I went back to bed. If only the start of every day could be postponed until noon…
The rest of the day was spent taking care of a few odds and ends and navigating Chama’s bizarre late-May weather—which vacillated every few minutes between bright hot sunshine, freezing wind, and sleet—while trying to find an open food service establishment in a town with a couple dozen restaurants, all of which seemed to be open for only a randomly selected three-hour window every week.
The reports coming down from the trail were inconsistent and hard to wring actionable information from, but the general consensus seemed to be: snow. Tons of blowdowns and snow. In theory we were prepared for exactly this, but it is difficult to sit for days on the precipice of an untraveled challenge without stewing on it. We heard rumors of hikers bailing halfway to Pagosa Springs and worried that we’d find ourselves among them. New Mexico had done very little to prepare us for any of this. In the morning, we’d be headed into the hardest hiking we’d have seen so far on the CDT—possibly the hardest hiking either of us had ever done, period. But that was tomorrow’s problem. Today, the best thing we could do was make the most of the time left to us in Chama. It would be our last night in New Mexico; at least for the next few hours, we could leave those worries over the border.
