Day 32
12 miles
I walked into Wells. It was 12 miles of paved road. I had to dig up our Wells cache just outside of town, and then carry the two food bags one mile to the hotel. I was crossing a vacant lot in the desert sun behind the hotel when Da Bear’s paper food bag burst open everywhere-he had a container of olive oil that had leaked into the bag, it seemed-I gathered the exploded contents of the bag into a stuff sack I had, and looking up, I saw a man, vagrant, also crossing the vacant lot, eyeing me. Not great. I made my way to the hotel and went to check in-the man followed me in and tried to talk to me, which I ignored. The front desk gave me a bit of a hard time about my reservation, and I felt the depth of my filthiness, my too-dark tan, my dusty backpack, my bags of food-we are all so affected by appearances, and I am not immune to this in this truck stop town. I went to the cool air conditioned hotel room and laid on the clean bed in the cool clean quiet. Da Bear texted me and let me know he had made it to the road. I made my way down to the truck stop and ordered him a takeout cheeseburger and a salad in the greasy diner. He arrived at 8:30 pm. Da Bear, an ultra runner who has completed four Iron Man races and about twenty thousand miles of long distance hiking, managed to travel nine miles in 12 hours of hiking the previous day in the East Humboldts. He stripped down to put his desert-dirty clothes in the laundry and devoured the cheeseburger in a few bites. We both went to sleep before 10.
Day 33
10.2 miles
We finished our chores in Wells. I realized, tragically, that I had been using a broken charging cable to charge my power bank, and it had not charged almost at all. We set up camp in the Wells McDonalds to charge it for a couple hours and ate ice cream a couple of times. We walked out of Wells at 4 pm and entered the open desert. The sun set and it finally became cooler. Our friend Joey was planning to meet us with his car to camp for the night on his way to go climbing in Nevada’s Wind River range. Scott noticed a single car, off the highway, slowly turn around on dirt roads-“that’s gotta be him.” Joey finally found us, and he had brought us a wonderful spread of fresh vegetables and food for dinner. We stayed up talking and laughing under the stars till 11 pm.
Day 34
20.1 miles
We got moving at 8:30 am, bidding Joey farewell. It feels amazing to meet friends on such a remote route as this. We made our way across the flat, hot basin, using our umbrellas to block the intense sun. The land became flatter and hotter-we entered the alkali flat, which is pure white, and the shrubs looked like they had been planted by a landscaper-otherworldly, like Alice in Wonderland. Scott and I took a break under our umbrellas and one small sad shrub from 2-4, giggling about nothing, like we were drunk, the only people for probably 50 square miles in this strange wasteland. We continued to hike, and the sun set and the stars came out. We stopped to camp. There were scorpions everywhere, of all sizes. I made sure to zip my tent up extra tight.
Day 35
17.6 miles
We started hiking at 7:30 am. We finished crossing the alkali flat and slowly climbed 3000 feet into the Pequot mountains. It was oppressively hot.
In the early evening, Scott noticed a pair of large plastic water collection tanks just below the ridge. We went down to investigate, delighted to find that they were full of clear water. We filled up and continued on the ridge for a bit longer-we set up on a small saddle when the notes indicated that the road became horse trail-I don’t want to night hike on a ridge on sketchy or nonexistent trail in the dark. We set up our tents and started to make dinner as the last of the hot sun faded in its intensity and went to bed behind the hills.
A scorpion, three inches long, casually strolled out from under my tent, then scurried away, poison stinger at the ready when I “encouraged” it with the edge of my macaroni wrapper.
“Damnit, there are scorpions up here too,” I lamented.
“You probably just accidentally folded that one up with your tent this morning,” Scott remarked. This idea horrified me, as I more stuff my tent in its stuff sack than fold. I went to sleep not long after the sun set.
Day 36
20.9 miles
We were woken up several times in the night by herds of wild horses galloping by, probably on their way to the water tank we had found a little ways back. It seems we camped right in the middle of a horse highway. I got moving in the morning at 7:55 am. It was already starting to get hot-not great, since we needed to cross the Goshute Valley. We got water at Boone Spring, which was reduced to a small, stinky pool-then continued down dirt road. At about 2 pm I found Scott under a juniper tree, spread out on his mat, trying to escape the heat. We took a long break here to wait out the heat a little bit. It’s amazing how much heat saps your energy. We started hiking again at 4 pm and got to the water and food cache. I took a bath and we slowly tried to stuff all of the new food in our packs, along with all the trash. We walked slowly up and out of Goshute Valley, into the evening, then the night. We camped at about 9 pm. Instead of scorpions, here, there were dozens of tiny cute grasshoppers that kept trying to dive bomb their way into my tent. I went to sleep at 10 pm.
Day 37
19.2 miles
We got moving at about 8 today. That’s really kind of late in this area, at this time of year-in that you can really already feel the intensity of the sun by 8 am. It was just so hot today. I slowly sweated up to Fourmile Spring, a piped spring with a filthy pool-lots of wild horses. We were sitting filtering water and eating a snack and a young brown and white horse came around the corner, wanting to get a drink, but also unsure about us. He would come towards us and then trot away 15 or so feet. We left him to his water after a bit and kept moving. The trail came upon an old ruined cabin and then was just horse trails for a few miles, back down towards highway 93. We had a put a water cache in at the halfway point between the spring and the highway, at about 10 miles-that would have been a painfully long, hot dry 21 miles, otherwise. We took a long break at the cache and ate dinner, then hiked into the evening, and the night, trying to get a few more miles in during the cool of the night. Da Bear has an old ankle injury that really acts up when there is a lot of flat or road walking. We set up camp alongside the dirt road at about 8 pm. I went to sleep almost immediately, exhausted by the heat.
Day 38
9ish miles
We made our way down to our water cache on interstate 93. Da Bear texted me on my Inreach-“let’s just go down into Ely.” I had no complaints. We looked morosely at the empty highway in the desert-a couple of cars passed and did not stop-and I started to write “HIKERS TO ELY” in black Sharpie on the back of my sleeping pad, when a very old man pulled over-“I don’t normally pick up hitchhikers…” and we thanked him profusely for pulling over this time. He drove us all the way to McGill, an hour. Then we got picked up by a Mexican man from Hidalgo, Mexico, who was on his way to Phoenix, who I talked to for the whole ride in Spanish. We checked in at a casino/hotel and ate huge lunches at the Mexican restaurant. We each got 2 margaritas, which was more than enough for a couple of dehydrated hikers.
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