[photos and reference links coming in May]
…….or snoozing in a motel room. Mom, Dad and H left for Denver at 0630 today. We all gave each other a big group hug, I took a stupidly underexposed picture of them, and they drove off in the dark. I decided to catch a few extra hours of much-needed sleep instead of riding out with them. I left the motel at 11 and walked up the main drag eating a pot of granola with banana for good luck. Stopped several miles up the road at Matrimony Spring to wash the pot and my face. It took me probably 20 minutes to get a hitch from that intersection up to the airport. I wanted to call Mike Coronella to ask for a ride (he lives in town and runs a guide service) and was working up the nerve when a young guy named Sully rolled down his window. He was visiting from Durango and had hair a shade lighter than mine in a scraggly bun. Thank you, Sully!!! I told him about the Hayduke and we talked about the surge of development and rising housing prices in Moab and Durango.
The vernal equinox is today. Granny’s birthday and the first day of spring. The irony of the vast amount of preparation I’ve done is that I’ve all but abandoned exercise and healthy sleep over the last weeks and months. I’m creaky and atrophied. So hoping to take it slow today.
I crossed the highway and started the Hayduke Trail at 12:37!!! An overcast day, great walking weather. Soon there were a couple sets of footprints to follow. Someone had scrawled “Hayduke 2022” in the sand. Delightful, giddying proof that my long-awaited dream is real today. Hayduke lives!!
I followed railroad tracks to pass through a barbed wire fence into a flat, gray, heavily impacted cow pasture. A few silent RV’s sat here and there on hills in the distance. I crested a rise and a cow and I surprised each other. Huge animal. I wonder if the people in the RV’s eat steak at night, looking out over this trampled landscape. I couldn’t do it. I love the taste, but everyone has a breaking point. I’d trade beef for the chance to see bison, pronghorn, wolves, bird life here. Probably too late.
Eventually crossed a cow-less region of sandy hillocks pocked with hundreds of thousands of tiny tracks. Amazing! In this area encountered the first cryptobiotic soil of the Hayduke. “Crypto” (yup), or just “crust,” is a symbiotic community of cyanobacteria, algae, lichen, mosses, and fungi that cover the ground in a jagged-looking layer up to several inches thick. It’s a hallmark of the Utah wilderness and a key player in the ecology of the desert. By stabilizing the soil and trapping moisture, the crust allows plants and in turn animals to make a living in dry, sandy environments. Enemies of the crypto include trampling cows and humans. Noted to stay on the road rather than go cross-country next time I have the choice. Don’t want to be one of those people who bust the crust. Karma keeps a watchful eye out here.
My legs already feel it a few hours in. A cottontail flees through juniper and ephedra; from out of sight comes a finch-sounding song. I consider myself a LNT (Leave No Trace) person. Today I’m vacillating between feeling bad when I step on crypto, telling myself to try harder, and considering that it may be impossible to avoid. I’m learning a lot. Had to backtrack from an impassable narrows in the Klondike Bluffs — I wasn’t where I thought I was. Jumped onto big, shifting boulders with less premeditation than I should have. Walked on human trails, animal trails, roads, and just ground with no path at all. Some areas have many footprints, some none, others just a few. I keep going back and forth on how many Haydukers I think are out here. Pretty confident I’m the first and only person doing the airport start today. Kinda cool. All very different from my memories of Day 1 on the PCT.
I kicked a tumbleweed down the road across Salt Valley. Late in the day, lustrous play of sun on yellow grass. Say’s phoebe singing on a broken tree. I one-upped him with a loud recording; he raised the ante and went into a hyper-version of his song. More birds: ravens diving in pairs over the sandstone bluffs, a small raptor with a white rump spot flying low and harrier-like over the prairie, a little one in juniper with a yellow bill and very dark eyes, gray above and buffy below. Tons of tracks in the lower wash on the way up to Devil’s Garden. Almost none human.
Now camp. It’s windy. The lightest possible spitting rain comes and goes a few minutes at a time. Hard to find a place to set up the tarp, which is bigger than the tent I’m used to. It occurs to me in a new way that I am taking a substantial risk by starting with all this gear that I’ve never tested before — my quilt, tarp, new shoes, homemade stove. Yep — the stove isn’t bringing water to a boil. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I tossed in some ramen and saved the heavy gnocchi I was planning on having this night. Maybe I’ll make the break to go stove-less on this trip. I finally get the tarp up, about the lowest pitch I can do (too low — it’s hard to move around in here). I’m exhausted. Bit of a headache. Wonderful first day. I can already tell the learning curve is steep out here.