At our campground in Green River, Utah (melon capital of the country) we were visiting our campsite neighbors when Ky said to them:
“When the money runs out I am gone.”
That declaration came as a surprise, particularly since our neighbors were impressed with our journey and mission (the alleged mission, not the private one for Cindy). Baking in the desert aside, Ky also enjoyed much of her experiences as a support person, from rides down huge sand mounds on dune buggies to making friends with locals. She likely meant those words for me, expressing in effect that she did not feel like one of us.
Ky’s declaration provided me relief. I spent the previous week “crunching the numbers” in my head during sizzling desert walks, concluding that we would indeed run out of money to fund our support. Fortunately, first two months revealed that Cindy could handle hiking without support, sometimes better than me, while I assumed the role of contacting news media as my own publicist. Under ideal circumstances I would have wanted Ky to stay with us for the duration, ironically as one of us, and was dreading to break the news otherwise. Now I was off the hook; the fact I felt such concerns and subsequent relief over finances perhaps confirmed Ky’s feeling that I was her employer and not her comrade.
Cindy reacted much differently to Ky’s declaration. Besides other stressors already mentioned, Cindy resented our hiking regimen in the desert being tailored to meet Ky at a designated time. Having been on supported journeys in the past, indeed, having been a support person herself, Cindy was accustomed to the support arriving first at a rendezvous point way ahead of time. Instead, there were a couple times when we waited for Ky. I understood that past support never had to wait in shadeless desert heat for hikers, but Cindy already felt that Ky was not one of us and the declaration just made that feeling worse.
We left Green River full packing for an overnight stretch on back roads, across shadeless Utah desert, with Barrett and Buster joining us for the first time since Nevada. We carried the only water we would encounter for four meals, twenty miles of hiking and our camp. I carried 1 ½ gallons, Cindy a gallon, and Barrett two gallons for him and Buster. I suspect desert walking with us was tough on the little dog. Barrett at times carried him around his neck. Whenever we stopped for a break Buster would lie near me and the shade cast by my imposing external frame pack. Barrett’s pack had to be heavier, but his was an internal frame.
Barrett was very low on water by the time we broke camp in the morning. We decided the best strategy was to hike ahead at our own pace, rendezvous with Ky and have her drive back with us on dirt roads to bring Barrett water. However, we got to the rendezvous point much earlier than we projected. By the time we were able to reach Barrett he had almost reached the rendezvous point as well. Fortunately, he was doing OK, perhaps due to his Desert Storm experience? That would be the last time he hiked with us though.
We spent the next five days slackpacking, visiting National Parks in the area, giving a talk at the Moab Lions Club, doing an interview with the local newspaper, and strategizing how to hike the next stretch. Gearheads, a local wilderness shop, gave us some free stuff and their own developed product, called Technical Lighting Solutions, to test out. Our hosts from the Lions Club, Dave and Marilyn, were an active couple much like us. We spent our first enjoyable Moab evening with them before setting up a base camp at a BLM campground by the Colorado River.
Ky’s birthday occurred during our time in Moab. I treated the visitation of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks as her birthday presents. Tension filled the air, however. Perhaps Ky wondered about my disregard of the fuel costs for these excursions, given our cash flow problem.
While in Moab we visited the BLM office with the goal of finding a way back towards the official ADT route. This required finding places to stash water caches across an area known as the Dolores Triangle, and the means to stash them. Ky would not be able to go into that desert backcountry with her minivan, but our campground host offered to help us out with his jeep.
Unfortunately, our plan to compensate for hiking across an area with no water was thwarted by too much water. As we went to place the caches we discovered that a creek barring our way to the Dolores Triangle could not be crossed with a jeep, even in August, because of the large amounts of precipitation that year. Our dependency on the support vehicle once again dictated our alternate route, which now would be into the Cisco desert, north of the ADT.
