Day 7 (04/06) : 75.5-91.2 :: 15.8 miles

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We camped in the bottom of the valley about a mile from the highway junction. Its was a bit windy, but we were sheltered by a nice big juniper tree. It’s called scissors because multiple highways come together here and form a scissors like shape when viewed from above. 

There is a highway bridge over a wash that the trail crosses under and that is where the water cache is located. There were 4 large black plastic tubs filled with gallons and gallons of water. While we sat and had breakfast, the guy who maintains the cache showed up to take away empty bottles for refill. He lives in the nearby community of Shelter Valley, which we could see on our descent yesterday. It’s a pretty remote place, with no groceries stores or gas stations, but they have an excellent protected water supply coming down from the mountainous national forest lands surrounding them. He gets the water from a town well we think. He also told us that old cisterns like the one we saw yesterday are only filled with rain water. They used to be filled for use by fire fighters for wild fires, but now that can be done by helicopter, the cisterns have been neglected. That’s a shame because the hikers sure would enjoy them! We saw another one yesterday that was empty.

We will be hiking all day today to the next water cache before we can get any more water, so we filled to max capacity, which for us right now is about 8 liters. Each bottle weighs 2 pounds filled, so we can really feel it when we’re loaded to max capacity. 

The climb out of scissors crossing was a cactus and wild flower wonderland! I took way too many pictures!For hours and hours going up we could see the highway junction below and we could also see the storm moving in and obscuring the Laguna mountains. We were lucky to be on a dry rain shadowy slope, watching the storm all afternoon and walking on high slopes above the valley of the San Felipe road. The last hour or so before fame we got misted on, but we have rain pants, rain jackets, backpack covers and umbrellas. The only thing that gets really wet is our shoes and this is more from the wet brush that from the actual rainfall. 

We camped near the water cache and found this one to be just as impressive as the last. We had to hike 1/4 mile down a side trail to a cup-de-sac at the end of a remote dirt road. This is where the cache was located, pallets of gallon jugs of water from Costco that were covered in tarps and sheltered by lemonade berry bushes. There was a chicken wire And wood framed little house constructed for holding all the empty bottles and there was even a funnel hanging from a tree for easy pouring into bottles. It is amazing that there are volunteers who do this, as the water it desperately needed on these dry stretches of trail!




































































Comments

  1. JGJune 3, 2020 at 4:06 PM

    The snake eating the gila monster was pretty impressive. Is that match considered a tie?
    Nice double rainbow too!
    What time of year for cactus blooms! That big cactus you’re standing next to looked like a saguaro, but then i realized you’re too far north for those. It’s a barrel cactus. As huge as I have seen. You know you can cut the top off those, if you’re dying of thirst & there is perfectly pure water inside the top.

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