The ADT Journey – Week 11

The first day of this week found us full packing through canyons in Capitol Reef National Park, with yet another thunderstorm lasting for hours.  The remaining days found us slackpacking along desert roads with nothing but sunny skies.

We managed to wait out the thunderstorm under a pavilion in Capitol Gorge.  Even with the protection I was a little apprehensive about flash flooding.  A flash flood through this same canyon reached seven feet during the deluge we experienced a few nights before.  Fortunately, the current storm did nothing more than delay our arrival to our rendezvous with Ky at the end of the day.

First the remainder of the gorge, then open lands, stretched between the park boundary and the road that was to be our destination.  The trail disappeared soon after the gorge but, no matter, we hiked mostly in a direct line towards the discernible road, still far in the distance.  Others must have gone a similar way, as we passed a sign propped up by farm equipment that read “WELCOME,” but we encountered a few obstacles that challenged the wisdom of our route.

Chief among the obstacles was a creek with a red clay bottom.  As I neared the far side of the crossing I sunk down fully up to my knees, like quicksand.  I pulled myself out with the help of a protruding root along the far bank, but even then the ordeal was exhausting.  Being of much less weight with body and pack Cindy fared better than me, but both our legs were covered with red clay after the crossing.

We reached the road near dusk, looking dirty and bedraggled.  We had insufficient energy to guess which way we should walk on the road to meet Ky and waited for her to come and find us.  A mother and daughter team pulled up to us first and invited us to stay at her parent’s bed and breakfast place down the road.  Taralyn was caretaking the place while her parents were on vacation.  During this conversation Ky arrived with news that Barrett and a friend who was visiting were back at the camp.  She went back to retrieve everyone for a rest day at the B&B.

Taralyn had experienced recent hardship in her life as a single mother whose house burned down.  The touching display of community support for her plight moved her to look for ways of paying it forward.  We became the latest beneficiaries of her Good Samaritan zeal.  Of course, this became one of the experiences that I would bring up in my future talks.

We left Taralyn’s great hospitality to slackpack our way across Utah desert, with the desert heat aggravating tensions between us.

Ky felt uncomfortable in the originally intended role of being my publicist/agent for the talks I gave across the country.  As I took over the role of being my own publicist the talking points I provided to news media focused on the kindness and community experienced, not the hiking or Cindy’s affliction.  One time when prompted to share details about our hike by a print media outlet, my neglect to mention Ky as our support person disappointed her.  I acknowledged this as a mistake, but something else also irritated her.

Ky felt we should have contacted and included her in the invitation to the dude ranch.  In our previous hikes with others, people in different situations experienced different trail magic and tribulations.  Instead of including everyone in everything, these varied experiences made for good stories to share when together again.  Plus the circumstances of the trail magic would have seemed like applying a bait and switch move on our benefactor.  I never thought about asking to include Ky and, in this case, did not acknowledge my neglect as a mistake.

Our finances stressed me.  My original calculations of cost were based on fuel for a single support vehicle.  The extra costs of chipping in for Ky’s camper, plus the extra fuel costs this meant, led to yet another cost of purchasing merchandise to sell along the way.  This included T Shirts, CDs of my songs about community and freedom, and a book I had published.

The idea was by selling this merchandise at talks I could cover the extra costs generated by the camper.  With a bit of foresight I might have realized I would not be giving many talks during the wilderness portion of our journey and be patient that our fortunes would turn around once we hit the plains.  Instead I sometimes gave away the merchandise to the abundant trail angels we met, a businessman I am not, while fretting about what to do when we ran out of funds for Ky.

Embarking on yet another detour also irritated me.  The previous detours were brought about by adverse weather and trail conditions experienced along the way.  When they added miles that felt like proper penance for deviating from the designated route.  The spectacular scenery through Hell’s Backbone would have made that recent detour a  planned detour anyways.

The detour we took after Capitol Reef NP was not so spectacular.  Based on the unimproved roads we had experienced so far, having Ky meet us with water through southeast portions of Utah was impossible with the camper attached, and difficult even if detached and stowed.  We absolutely depended on meeting Ky for water while hiking through the remote desert in summer and had to take a northern detour that brought us north to Green River, then back south to Moab.

Having experienced the slot canyons of southeast Utah previously, I wanted to follow the ADT route through there.  I also did not like that this detour would be shorter.  Because we were hiking home from the end of the ADT, tacking on a few hundred miles, we were in no real danger of falling below 5,000 total miles for the journey, but reaching that milestone was important for me.

Cindy’s stress was caused foremost by our “halfway house” back home.  To shorten a long story and omit delicate details, three people around the ages of our own children were staying at our house, while our oldest daughter Charissa served as landlord.  Two were delinquent in paying rent, a source of stress for our daughter and me, and I could not help out because of our own financial challenge on the trail.  The delicate details I omitted about our “halfway house” caused even greater stress for Cindy.

Before, during and after the brief visit of Ky’s friend Jenny, Ky spoke in glowing admiration about her pursuit as a graduate student looking for dinosaur fossils across the Utah landscape.  This seemingly innocuous praise of Jenny as an amazing Adventure Woman living out of her car irritated Cindy, the Expedition Woman who has bivouacked and navigated cross country wilderness routes on her own.  I do not think this would have bothered Cindy under normal conditions, but the feeling of one’s independence and capabilities being robbed by the cruel fate of cognitive decline causes a person to perceive unintended slights.

For the first two months of hiking Cindy started the day lifting both our spirits with her cheerful embrace of the day. On this stretch that changed. Weighed down by her stress, I detected few smiles from Cindy. Given that the purpose of the hike was to relieve her stress this concerned me. I tried to compensate, being as cheerful as I could in the morning, but by afternoon the desert heat compromised my mood as well.

The temperatures no doubt made moods worse.  One night during this stretch barely fell below 100 degrees, and one day a DOT worker stopped us while road walking to check if we were alright and to tell us we were hiking in 132 degree heat.  Yet at least by this time the desert heat did not phase us physically.  I came up with a strict, regimented routine of stopping every three miles to imbibe small quantities of water and food, generally finishing the 20-25 mile days by 2:00 pm.  We may have been cranky and stressed, but we were now lean, mean, desert hiking machines.