There are mistakes you make without realizing it.
And then there are the ones you carry 30 miles in a Ziploc bag.
The pizza was good. In town. Yesterday.
Pizza doesn’t belong in a Ziploc bag in the Arizona sun for 12 hours. I knew that. I did it anyway.
It deserved better than what I turned it into.
But getting close to the end had me feeling invincible. Like I’d figured something out. Like the rules didn’t apply the same way anymore.
I’d gotten comfortable. Something the trail tends to correct.
It was nearly 30 miles from the trailhead outside of Kearny to the rain collector at Freeman Road. Not like the stretch before. No long downhill. No clouds. Just heat that pressed you into the shade and afternoon breaks stretched out for far too long. Clothes draped over thorny branches to dry, body stilled to the edge of sleep until the sun softened its grip.
The rain collector sits out there holding 1,500 gallons of pure survival. I rolled in just after dark. Drank deep. Then set up less than a mile out. Hiker midnight. That space after dark where your body is done, your mind not all there, and a hunger the heat of the day wouldn’t allow. The pizza made sense again.
But it didn’t take long for that decision to come back around.
I woke up halfway through the night, with the kind of urgency that pulls you out of your bivy before you’re fully awake. Crescent moon overhead. Silence everywhere else. I used all my toilet paper. Lost whatever water I’d managed to hold onto. Sleep came in fragments after that, if it came at all.
By morning, there wasn’t much left to do but move. Back to the road. Off trail, toward the nearest bathroom. Sixteen miles out, at a casino. A sacred destination when your priorities narrow enough.
I didn’t make it far. Ended up off the side of the road, cutting up my socks to solve a problem I hadn’t planned for, as two cars passed in the wrong direction.
Fellow hikers. Dropping off a car to hike the section I was now trying to escape.
By the time I was back on the road, they were there.
Right place. Right time.
#ArizonaTrail #AZT #sobo