March 29
Mileage: zero

A wild windstorm blows in during the night and rattles the motel and when we wake it’s ice-cold and the forecast calls for freezing rain in the desert everywhere. We’d planned on zeroing in 2 days when we get back here but it’ll be sunny then and it’s awful today and if we hike out we’ll be fighting our way up the Dirty Devil river in the freezing rain, and the river is opaque and you can’t see the quicksand and that sounds potentially dangerous? so fuck it, let’s zero.

DropnRoll and Bubbles are staying another night! And they’ll split our motel room with us! Which is awesome, for the company, and also because motel rooms are $100 a night for some reason in this busted little town.

And then Brett Tucker and Treehugger show up!! They’re starting the Hayduke in a few days, and are driving through Utah setting their caches. We all hang out in our motel room for a while- and my god it feels good to be around other hikers, and make stupid hiker jokes that only hikers think are funny, and talk about this incredible ass-kicker of a dreamlike trail that has got me so enchanted like nothing else.

For the rest of the day I lay in bed a lot doing phone errands, eat at each restuarant in town (plus some gas station food)… and that’s pretty much it. So rest. Much awesome. Wow.

Photos on instagram