March 13, 2022
- Start: Stealth spot near Mountain View Tank (Mile 216.2)
- End: Junction for Wildlife Tank (Mile 242.1)
- Distance: 25.9 miles
It was such a deliciously warm night (and morning) at my campsite underneath the saguaro cactus. I was all by myself, and the weather of the Arizona Trail was finally cooperating with me. No more hail or snow. No more frozen water bottles. Nor katabatic washes. Not even any wind.
Just the warm sunrise and a hot cup of coffee. What a wonderful way to wake up. I think I might be in love with this trail and I wish every day could be like this. I even put on a pair of fresh socks before packing up camp.
The activity on the AZT seemed to be busier than ever this morning too. Lots of cottontail bunnies scampering across my path. Birds were flitting around and singing to each other. And there were a handful of bees out investigating the wildflowers that were just beginning to bloom.
The trail took a lovely route through some teddy bear cholla whose dense, fuzzy limbs almost looked soft. I had to be careful to give it a wide berth though. I knew it might reach out and grab onto me. The path’s edge was already lined with evidence of small balls that “jumped” off the cactus.
And then, I got cell service and did the one thing I was thinking about all night. I looked up the sole hotel in the town of Kearny, to make sure they had availability before booking myself a room for tomorrow night and the following night.
Kearny was going to be my first zero, and my plan once I got there was to just lay in bed. All. Day. Long. Maybe I’d get up to eat some town food from the local restaurants. Or drink some beer. But mostly I was just looking forward to doing nothing at all and resting my feet.
BEEHIVE WELL
I was cruising down toward Camp Grant Wash, which was bigger than any of the washes I’d seen thus far. It was so sandy and wide that I nearly lost the trail entirely. I followed a set of footprints that led me astray (probably toward someone’s campsite) and then had to back track until I found the tall metal sign that I’d somehow missed my first time through.
It’s been a while since the AZT crossed though anything like this. And more often than not, there always seemed to be enough footprints or mountain bike track to find my way. I barely even opened my navigation app anymore unless I was trying to figure out the distance to the next water source.
Yet getting a full quarter-mile off track in Camp Grant Wash was a reminder. I needed to pay closer attention out here.
Beyond the wash, it was just a short walk toward the Beehive Well, which I expected to be my only reliable water source of the day. I could see the tall metal cistern long before I got to it. A spindly looking windmill stood next to a solar pump house, and beyond it was a tank filled with greenish turquoise water that was so full it was nearly overflowing.
As I made my way down to the tank, I spotted a young, female hiker in her 20s up ahead of me. She was only wearing a tank top and shorts, and was so tan that she looked like she’d been on trail a month already.
I waved a friendly hello to her as I approached and she pointed me over to the pipe that was pouring fresh clear water into the tank. The rest of the standing water was covered thick layer of greenish scum, so I thanked her for the advice. Getting water directly from the pipe (instead of dipping my water bladder into the algae-filled tank) was going to save my filter some serious work.
I left my water bladder hanging from a nail on the pump house to gravity filter, then went over to find out more about the new hiker. Her trail name was Moonshine and she said she was hiking the Grand Enchantment Trail from Phoenix to Albuquerque.
I knew about the GET from one of the podcasts I listened to. It’s a 770-mile route created by Brett Tucker that make winds its way across Arizona and New Mexico. Sometimes it follows existing trails (like the AZT), but other times it’s on dirt roads, though washes, or cross-country.
The GET is considered one of the more advanced hiking routes in the desert Southwest, and the extreme scratches on Moonshine’s legs told the story of its ruggedness far better that her words ever could. She said there was a lot of bushwhacking on those early miles, and her scabbed up shins looked liked she gotten into a fight with a pack of feral cats.
Moonshine was tanking up with as much water as she could, since Beehive Well was where the GET parted ways with the Arizona Trail. Soon she’d leave this well-defined path and venture back out into the wilds again, where there were bound to be much sparser and less frequent water sources.
I plied her for information about the water sources to my north. The seasonal tanks weren’t great, she told me, but there was a cache of water up at the Freeman Road Trailhead, in about 8 miles. Some trail angels came through yesterday and filled the bear box with about 10 gallons of water. So, there should still be plenty there.
Despite Moonshine’s assurances about the Freeman Road water cache, I didn’t want to rely on it too strongly. I guzzled an entire liter of water while I ate my second breakfast, and then loaded up with 3 full liters of water just in case the cache was unexpectedly depleted.
TRAIL MAGIC??
Of course, the fact that I was now carrying 6.6 pounds of water meant that the trail took a sharp ascent up some big hills. What did I always have to go uphill immediately after loading up on water or resupplying of food?? Just dumb luck, I guess.
Once I got up to the top of the climb about three miles later, I felt pretty depleted physically. The sun was climbing high in the sky, and without and clouds for protection, it felt like it was baking the top of my skull.
Another pyramid-shaped hill rose up to my north and I prayed that I wouldn’t have to go up it too. Please, oh please, let the AZT skirt around to the side of it, I prayed.
As I was pleading for the trail gods to realign the trail, I crossed paths with another female hiker headed southbound. Her trail name was Red Dragon, and she had a bit of a southern twang that revealed she called North Carolina home.
She was section-hiking the AZT this year and heading south from Pine and I asked her about her AZT experience thus far. That’s when she looked me dead in the eyes and told me in an incredibly serious voice, “Don’t go into the Superstitions by yourself. The trail is super difficult to find. You’ll get lost if you’re alone.”
Hmmm. That was a new take. I hadn’t heard anyone talking about getting lost in the Superstition Wilderness. Part of me wondered if she’d had a bad experience there. Or was she just one of those people who likes to fear monger by repeating rumors up and down the trail. I had a GPS route on my phone. How hard could finding the trail really be?? I guess I’d soon find out.
As I bid Red Dragon goodbye, I asked her one last question. Had she’d stopped at the Freeman Road trailhead? Moonshine said there was a robust water cache in the bear box there. Was that intel still accurate?
She confirmed it was true. And there was even a guy at the trailhead doing trail magic when she left an hour ago. Perhaps it was Doug — the guy doing trail magic at the Tiger Mine trailhead yesterday. Was he hopping from trailhead to trailhead with a flurry of trail magic??
FREEMAN ROAD
Shortly after parting ways with Red Dragon, my knees started cramping up. I must have locked them when I was standing there on an incline talking for the past five minutes. It took close to 10 minutes of slow limping for me to work the kinks out and resume my normal pace. I guess it’s just one more sign from my body that I really need that upcoming zero in Kearny.
About an hour later, I was closing in on the Freeman Road trailhead. There were two cars and a van parked in the nearby parking area. But there didn’t seem to be anyone doing trail magic when I arrived. Oh well. Sometimes you win some, sometimes you lose some.
The cache of water was still waiting in the bear box though. And right beside the gallon jugs of water, there was a white plastic grocery bag filled with a few semi-cold canned drinks. I guess the person doing trail magic stowed the leftovers in the box when they departed.
I grabbed a mini can of Coke from the bag, and headed over to the picnic area. It wasn’t much. Just a stone bench. But at least someone had the forethought to build a patio structure out of long ocotillo branches, so there was some shade from the blisteringly hot sun.
I plopped down into the soft dirt using the stone bench as a backrest and pulled out my lunch, but I was only sitting there for a handful of minutes before a group of three more hikers joined me from the opposite direction.
Three more GET hikers! And all of them looked so much filthier than I felt. Dirt caked their arms and legs. It didn’t look like they made a town stop in Kearny. Or if they did, they clearly hadn’t sprung for a hotel and a shower.
The three GET hikers seemed lost in conversation with each other about a dead rabbit that they’d seen in one of the metal water cisterns. Then they bandied private jokes back and forth, and I seemed to be the odd man out, so I just kept to myself until my lunch break was over and it was time to get walking once again.
THE BUBBLE
I didn’t see the AZT trail register until I was departing the trailhead, so I stopped for a quick minute to glance at the names of the hikers who signed it ahead of me. It looked like there were only two AZT hikers passing through here this morning: a person name Leah and another named Eagle.
I scanned further up the register for other names I might recognize. The Tres Amigos were ahead of me by two days and so was Yoda. The day before that Salsa and Helium passed by here. I wondered if I’d every catch any of them in the days to come.
The sun was now directly overhead and blisteringly hot. And it was accompanied by a wind blowing sand and dirt against my face. But, at least the walking was nice and flat and super easy. There didn’t seem to be any more giant hills ahead of me.
About a half hour after departing the trailhead, I crossed paths with another hiker walking southbound, and I immediately assumed it was another GET hiker. They seemed to be everywhere here.
In reality, I knew this wasn’t true. The GET wasn’t that popular. These hikers were just walking south, and I was walking north so our paths were bound to intersect somewhere.
Yet, he wasn’t actually part of the southbound GET bubble after all! The lanky young man introduced himself as TinTin, and he said he was hiking the AZT. He was currently heading southbound – walking from Pine to Oracle – but then planned to flip back up to Pine to hike northbound again. I didn’t ask him why, instead peppering him with questions about the section of the Arizona Trail he’d already hiked.
TinTin was far more upbeat about what lay ahead of me than Red Dragon had been. He also looked genuinely perplexed when I asked about the Superstitions, assuring me there was no reason to fret about that section. None of it was any more difficult that the rest of the AZT. Water was still flowing. I would be fine.
I thanked him for the good info and wished him good luck before re-focusing my attention on the desert. Up ahead, the terrain was much greener, with bushes and cactus as far as the eye could see. It amazing how the desert’s appearance completely changes in just a few miles.
I walked through the sunshine and wind for another hour and a half before I saw another soul out here. A mountain bike lay beside the trail with a small backpack of tools. And not too far away, I found its owner – a tall guy with a giant pair of clippers removing prickly branches that criss-crossed the trail who introduced himself as Topo (short for topographic, I presumed).
Riding out here with a bag full of heavy a tools was no easy feat. But the trail doesn’t maintain itself, even in the desert. This lovely path always needs a little TLC from trail stewards like this him, and it’s one of the reasons I believe every hiker (and mountain biker) should volunteer to do some trail maintenance. Many thanks, Topo!
WILD BEASTS
Just beyond my meeting with Topo, the desert seemed to change again before my eyes. It looked as if a layer of grass was growing out in the middle of the desert. This was the oddest sight, with patches of vegetation spreading across the sandy desert floor and large boulders appearing ahead of me!
A bit further up I spotted a piped gate stretching across the path, but this one was different that the others. It wasn’t the gate closure or even the fence that set it apart. Rather this gate had some sort of added weight and pulley contraption to ensure it remained closed after people passed through it.
It wasn’t a terribly sophisticated set up nor difficult to open, but it seemed to be much more elaborate than the simple locks or chains that secured more of the gates along the AZT. After pondering a bit about, I developed a working hypothesis. Perhaps this section is more popular among equestrians, and this method of opening (and automatically closing) the gate eliminated the need for the riders to dismount their horses. After all, the tension weight just pulled the gate closed once you passed through.
I met my fifth (and final) GET hiker around 4:30 pm this afternoon. As we stopped to exchange our hellos, he ask me how much farther his compatriots were ahead of him. He was hoping to catch them today, but he’d gotten sick on something he’d bought during his resupply in Kearney, and he was now moving super slow.
It had been a solid three hours since I last saw them back at the trailhead. But who knows how much longer they lingered in the shade taking their break. They could have departed five minutes after me or waited out the heat of the day for several hours. If I had to guess, they were probably heading to the Beehive Well for the night.
He thanked me profusely for the info, and then I returned my focus to the hills covered dotted with saguaro cactus that lay ahead of me.
I walked along for the next hour, completely lost in my thoughts and barely looked up in time to catch an unexpected wildlife sighting. Directly ahead of me, down in the shade of a draw, two or three animals seemed to be moving.
They were the size of small dogs, but as I got closer they took off running down a dirt jeep trail. These animals definitely weren’t dogs! They looked more like dark-colored pigs. Holy heck. They were javelina!
I remembered the warning about javelina back when I stayed at that little campground outside of Patagonia. But this was the first time I’d actually seen them with my own two eyes!!
Unfortunately, they ran off into the shadow of a hill and then into the brush before I got a decent photo of them. And I didn’t see them again. But it was an excellent reminder to make sure my food was sealed up tightly in my OpSak (odor proof plastic bag) tonight. I didn’t want one of these little nocturnal scavengers coming to wake me in the middle of the night!
POWER LINES
As the sun started to drop lower in the sky, it was time to start looking for a place to set up camp. I’d walked just about 26 miles thanks to the easier, flat terrain and today, my feet were toast. I was 100% ready to stop.
I made it as far as the junction with a jeep road leading to the Wildlife Tank, and I figured that was good enough for today. Surely there would be at least one or two existing campsites near a major trail junction that led to a water.
As I surveyed my surroundings, there was just one problem: the massive power lines directly overhead. I probably wouldn’t get cancer from sleeping under them for a single night, but I wasn’t eager to risk it either.
I stood at the junction looking down the jeep road. It was super tempting to just head a quarter mile further inland toward wildlife the tank so I could camp there. But somewhere in the back of my mind I worried that the water source might be a magnet for the javelinas (or the other critters) I knew were wandering the desert.
So I spilt the difference. I walked about 200 yards down the road – or as far away from the high voltage electric lines to feel like I wasn’t grow a third arm by the electromagnetic fields. And then I ate my dinner while staring at a magnificent desert sunset with the purring and crackling of the massive power lines in the background.
HIGHLIGHTS
- I was overjoyed to spot some new wildlife this afternoon. This was my first javelina sighting on the AZT.
- The day was filled with lots of people sightings too – five GET hikers, two southbound AZT section hikers, and one trail maintainer (on a bike!)
- The water at Beehive well was really clear and plentiful and there was an unexpected water cache at Freeman Trailhead. So all told, no water worries on this super warm day.
CHALLENGES
- My body starting to feel the miles – especially my right ankle and my knees. I can’t wait to get to Kearny tomorrow afternoon.
- I’m super tired (physically) and today felt like a really long day. But then again, I nearly hiked a marathon in the desert!