arrived in silver city

It was great to finally be going north of Lordsburg! Gogo and Blueberry had the room next to mine and the walls are thin enough that when they woke up, I woke up. They've been traveling at a similar pace to Slim and I, but with a curious schedule... From 4 am to 11, then again from 6 or 7 pm to 11 pm or so. Once I woke up in the night thinking cars were driving on the road far away, but they were the headlamps of Gogo and Blueberry. I rolled over and went back to sleep... No need to holler out at people late at night!

It's great the way our paths cross and recross. We can always recognized Slims enormous feet and huge stride. Information travels up and down the path. The feeling of community is amazing. 

So Slim and I headed north, then east across often trackless desert, always climbing gently. It was beautiful the way Lordsburg receded, and multiple days of the hot, blasted country we'd been through opened up. Big Hatchet Mountain shimmered blue in the far distance, no longer the forbidding peak towering over us. We headed towards Apache Mountain, and the sun slowly gained dominion over the land.

I followed the wrong track at some point and ended up well off the normal route. I followed a road south to rejoin. There are markers every so often on the horizon, and footprints in the sand keep you on the right track usually. Desert washes are where I usually went wrong, as several paths exit. I saw a cute pair of road runners in here... Little walking birds that move forward with purpose, then hesitate in an endearing way... In unison.

Slim and I met up again after an hour, when the trail turned up in a braid of sandy roads and washes. We were making for the "engineers well," the first of three water sources on this stretch. I met Dragonsky in here, a young lady from New Jersey. We got to the well and found a nearly empty tank with a few dozen bees swarming around it... And clear, running water!

Despite the bees, I reached in among them and filled my water bladder. Then I sat down to filter the water next to Slim in the shade. Over the next days Slim told me about his hike of the PCT four years ago. It was great, but he had to dodge fire closures for the last 70 miles in the North Cascades. Some of his urgency to push rapidly forward is based on the reasonable fear of fire closures later in the season.

above, Slim resting on the great tilted plain above Lordsburg.

Only a mile after the well, Slim and I hit a major milestone, the first hundred miles! We climbed up into ridges of shattered granite, and increasingly, trees! After twenty something miles, we dropped down to highway 90 and the rumour of a trail angel named Solo who might have some Gatorade. Sure enough, she was there! She had two chairs, and insisted Slim and I sit in them. I tried to demur and sit on the big mat she had laid out, but she was ready for that. "I still won't sit in the chair," she said.

We three had a great conversation about Elon Musk, about censorship, about the felt presence of God or "whatever you want to call it" in the mountains. Solo said that she was transformed by the experience of raising a son with autism... She had to change herself in order to be closer to him, and the change was deeply for the better. Slims wife Tor is an energy healer, and we discussed the definition of the term "new age," about what we like and dislike about it. Slim shared a beautiful story of how he met Tor.

Finally, Solo offered us tequila shots and sent us off to bed down in the trees. The milky way and shooting stars sent me to sleep. So ended the first day of the second leg.

Up early, we walked up and down, mostly side hilling generally north, bound for Burro Mountain, the high point of this section, over 8000 feet. Slims blog tells nicely of this stretch.

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here is Slim at the "solar well," getting water.

We've got pine trees! It did much for our spirits to see these. 

More to come...