Pie Town to Grants:
Miles: 76.7 miles
We made it through New Mexico!…..Well, kinda.
We set out from Pie Town for our last NM town. This stretch of trail really wasn’t much trail at all. We would endure mostly road walk on the hot surface for the majority of our way.
Seeking shade under solar panels and bushes, our pace picked up, making the dreadful miles go by a little quicker.
We entered the Cebolla Wilderness, a small side trail to break up our road miles, where we followed obvious bear tracks - happy to be behind the tracks vs. in front of the bear.
We were once again back on the road, but quickly arrived to the Narrows Rim Alternative.
Looking down on the small cars passing by, we viewed beautiful sandstone bluffs surrounded by jagged lava fields. Volcanoes were active in this El Malpais area from 3,900 to 115,000 years ago.
Leaving La Ventana Arch we were a little nervous about how much water we had left - we hadn’t been to a water source in 24 hours and still had 9 miles to go for the day. Next thing you know we were each provided a banana and bottle of water by some folks. We thanked them, and felt more confident for our next miles.
We continued on, (with another guy who pulled over to give us an ice cold Coca Cola!!) and arrived at our last camp spot, which included a water spigot and a pavilion with picnic table - hiker trash charms.
We arrived into Grants on Sunday, June 5th, stopping for a beer at the Route 66 Brewery - a celebratory drink was in order for passing our 400 mile mark! Laundry, showers, lovely hiker, biker and traveling nurse company and pizza filled our souls for the next 2 days while we stayed at a hostel.
We had finished New Mexico as far north as we could. The US Forest Service had announced on 5/13 (8 days after we first started) that forests would be closing in NM due to extreme fire danger. As much as it hurt us to know we would have to skip 250 miles in northern NM, we realized it was out of our control and that even more so, it wasn’t impacting our livelihoods as much as it was for others. We’re out here to hike. These active and potential fires were destroying people’s homes and sacred land.
This closure spread out the 500 NOBO hikers everywhere. Some decided to quit, some decided to jump ahead to Colorado or even skip Colorado and go to The Great Divide Basin. The brave ones pushed forward and roadwalked around the forests.
Ross and I decided to take our time. We had no reason to get to Colorado to realize that there was still too much snow. We didn’t want to skip all of Colorado - we had been to the San Juans in Sept. 2021 and knew just how amazing it would be to revisit them. So we took our time: a blessing in disguise for my feet and where we got to actually soak in the trail. Something thru hiking is all about, but always a sense of urgency to keep going as racing the winter seems to be the biggest competitor.
If we make it to MT/Canada in time, we hope to come back to NM to connect our footpath and finish the 250 miles.
The desert was a great way to start the trail, but now onto the state that we’ve been looking forward to! We are pumped for Colorado! We can’t wait to be in higher elevation and view some big mountains.
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