March 18
Mileage: 6?

Winter is an apartment in Sedona, Arizona that costs half my income but is cheap, still, for Sedona; a couple of rooms filled with light, already furnished with old leather couches and a bed; I find a card table to eat on and some simple dishes to boil my sweet potatoes and make tea. When I first arrived I slept in my van in the hard red desert but a dusting of snow came and I couldn’t spend my life under blankets so an indoors had to be procured.

Dan lives in a busted trailer amongst the saguaros down near the Mexico border, four hours to the south. The trailer has no heat and he wipes his dishes clean with a rag and drinks from a jug and the wind howls, rocking the trailer and coating his things with dust. Nearby is a dark hole in the ground where humans pick at the earth, looking for gems. The owners of the mine live in Las Vegas. Dan is here for the winter to keep the rogue gem-hunters away, those weathered misfits with their 4wd vehicles who live for gem shows and abandoned mines such as this one.

I met Dan last summer on the Continental Divide Trail. He was hiking the Colorado trail, which overlaps with the Continental Divide Trail for several hundred miles. We were traveling opposite directions, and met in Lake City, a one-street town, at the Ravens Rest Hostel. We had breakfast together. Dan was quiet and good-looking. A few months later I saw him again, at a hiker gathering in the woods. He slept in my van with me and tried to hold my hand during the day. He’s very handsome, I thought. And almost equally as awkward.

I know no-one in the small redrock town of Sedona save for Caity and Drew, a bike-punk couple who work at a healing resort where Sean “Puffy” Combs sometimes stays. I write a lot, pecking away at my old laptop in my bright spare rented rooms, and trail run in the hard red desert among the enchanted stacks of rocks. Every other week I drive south to the saguaros to visit Dan. We explore lava ridgelines in the howling desert and look for water sources and push our way through mesquite forests in dry riverbeds. The Sonoran nights are bitter cold, though the days are hot. On Christmas day we drive to Utah and sit in a hotspring in the snow. On Dan’s birthday in February I bring down a cake and for an entire day we just eat cake, the butter frosting growing soft in the warm, still trailer.

Dan has hiked the Te Aoroura Trail in New Zealand and the Colorado Trail, and this year he has plans to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.

“Why don’t you come hike the Hayduke Route,” I say to him, “instead, with me.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Ok.”

In the mid nineties, Mike Coronella and Jim Mitchell got a wild hair and spent ninety days in the canyonated country of Utah’s Colorado Plateau- a broad expanse that looks completely flat from the air but which is actually riddled with secret cracks, and within these cracks are ancient, secret worlds. For these ninety days Mike Coronella and Jim Mitchell travelled almost entirely cross-country, scrambling in and out of canyons so remote as to be nearly unknown and so sketchy as to be nearly impassible. Rivers, deep sand, tangles of trees, jumbles of boulders, quicksand, slot canyons, flash floods, pouroffs, poison springs, the ruins of ancient human dwellings complete with pottery shards and dried up corncobs. Mike and Jim strung together 800 miles of these canyons and thus, the Hayduke route was born.

Dan is thirty-two. He makes a living as an engineer- or at least, he did, until he got his own wild hair and cashed in part of his 401k to be free and hike long distances for a few years. He’s having a sort of rumspringa, and I know that one day he’ll go back to the regular world from whence he came, whereas I have always existed in this ephemeral place, on the edge of everything. I’m also mostly gay and in this way, too, we are an odd pair, but for a little while we can exist in this land outside of time- because what else is long distance hiking, if not that- for a little while we can live here, together.

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We take two days to drive from Sedona to Moab. It’s hard to say goodbye to my apartment- goodbye oven, goodbye refrigerator, goodbye bathtub. Goodbye evenings spent binge-watching netflix on goodbye couch. I had an indoors for 3.5 months, now I live in nowhere and everywhere again. For a time I had a heater and windows to block the rain and looked at myself in a mirror. Now it’s back to the great expansive world beyond.

We stash Dan’s car in bright windblown Kanab, Utah and then wind our way through “Canyon Country” on beautifully passible dirt roads in my van. (We keep waiting for the roads to turn to shit, we make jokes about taking my van off “sweet jumps”.) We bury our four-gallon bucket food caches in auspicious places, eat only junk food, and feel generally at peace.

On the third day, March 18, we reach the Klondike Bluffs trailhead in Moab. It’s 5:30pm, we’ve got just a little over two hours of light. The land is piled-up lumpkins of smooth red rock and deep red sand almost as fine as the air. We walk cross-country over these lumpkins, which are stacked and strewn every which way, and through this sand, and sometimes there is a bit of jeep road, or a cactus patch, and that is what we do. The sun is bright but the weather is cool.

I’m in a horrid mood at first. For whatever reason. I can’t stop thinking about all the things I can’t control, and there are a lot of them. But then I realize I’m hiking and that is fun and the sun begins to set beautifully behind the lumpkins and I’m out here in this peaceful place and I get to eat noodles for dinner. And later there will be stars.

We camp in the fine warm sand and the night is cold. Just a little bit of Hayduke so far.

Photos on instagram