[photos and links coming in May]
Woke at 0500 just like yesterday. Full moon, bright enough to walk, considered breaking camp. Again like yesterday, instead I fell asleep and woke at 830, long past dawn. I dreamed my charging cable broke (it’s hanging on by a metallic thread). The sky is a very dry clear blue, almost cloudless, with a powder moon in the West. For now, I’m happy with dry.
On visual inspection my pinky toes seem fine, but they still pinch when I walk. It occurred to me yesterday that this whole Hayduke thing might be the world’s most elaborate trick played by someone who either really admires me or really has it in for me. All it would take is to create a dozen websites or so, fill them with content, and have someone on the other end send me the guidebook and email me Skurka’s bundle when I ordered them. The travel has been perfectly doable, but a lot of it just ??? inducing. The kind of thing you could have fun with for few days, but 800 miles of it stretches the imagination into Lewis and Clark territory.
The first few miles today are over vegetated dunes (bleh) and slickrock (easy; the orientation of the bands is in exactly the direction I want to go, so it’s like walking on a long hilly sidewalk). At camp I set a bearing of 138 degrees or so, aiming for the lower right edge of the La Sals. An hour later I reached a giant cliff in exactly the right place! All the features matched the map; the park road snaked around the Tower of Babel at the correct angle in the distance. No CalTopo required. 🙂
After an hour of crossing an undifferentiated sea, the vista that suddenly opened as I stepped up to the edge was easily the most fabulous I’ve experienced so far. “HAYDUKE LIVES!!!” “Ayduke lives! Duke lives! Lives! Live!” The echo just kept coming, once, twice, three times, four, more, as it rounded each bend in the canyon wall, farther and farther until lost in the wind. The wind never stops. I wished I had someone to share the glory of that moment with.
The descent was humbling. It reminded me of those maze books we had at home when I was little. Lots of searching back and forth, checking for ways to proceed to the next level. Many of the mazes we never solved. The Great Wall was an object lesson of Mitch and Mike’s admonition to never go down when you’re not sure you can come back up. Standing here after what I hope was the crux, I don’t know what I would have done if I were short or not okay with bouldering. Along the entire wall, this is the only place to descend and ascend without rope. Two pockets in the stone provide the only means to pull oneself back up — I made sure of it before I let go of them. I walked across the entire wall, checking carefully. I don’t think I missed any other way.
Once down from the Wall I funneled into Courthouse Wash, which was broad, flat and snarled with willow and cottonwood above the road bridge. Lots of tracks in the wash bottom: human, deer, an enormous raven. Below the bridge was plenty of water, which brought other novelties: singing warblers and other birds whose ID’s I couldn’t remember, beaver-felled cottonwoods, a frog, a pair of ducks. Big smooth canyon walls sprang up almost immediately, forcing a choice between walking in the canyon or on the rim. Often the rows of cottonwoods and canal-like stream resembled a park. I wondered if I would have to plunge into the water to cross, but I never did. Found no quicksand either (I had my first encounter with it in a wash bottom yesterday, when I stepped into a shallow pothole full of solid-looking red sand that liquefied underfoot. Crazy!).
The scale of the wash walls soon became impressive and only grew from there. I’m taking a siesta on a grassy bank in the sun above the trickling stream, an extremely pleasant place. Free add rock wren, pinyon jay, turkey vulture, spotted towhee (drink-drink-teeea!) and maybe lesser goldfinch to my bird list for the last 24 hours. I’m surely missing a lot. It’s hard to tell how recent the footprints here are. I’m hoping to see hikers but I doubt it’ll happen. Solutions to stove problems: 1) go stoveless, 2) eat low-cook foods like ramen and mashed potatoes, 3) get it to work somehow. Tarp problems: 1) learn a pyramid-style pitch/get the right size and shape tarp to do it, 2) practice a lot more with what I have.
Back to Moab in a few hours!