CDT Day 19 (6/6/23)

Miles 479.2 (Red line 594)- 503.9 (Red line 618.7) (24.7 miles)

Verbatim

The consumption of pig on the CDT has occurred! I hiked a quick 6 miles into the water cache this morning and met Thomas, a 31 year old section hiker who is carrying way to much water and stuff in his pack. He’s been out for five days since Grants. We chatted about religion and school and Seventh-day Adventism. He’s a Catholic and has stuck with his faith despite his growing pains and theological growth. I respect that!

We took lunch together and he shared a pepperoni and cheese wrap with me. It was really good, although I now have a bit of a headache and feel lethargic. It’s hot in the overhead sun, although today is really windy and cool and generally cloudy. I’m waiting for a bank of clouds to roll overhead so that I can hike in the shade. We’ll see if one comes!

Mid day was hard! It was so hot and sunny. The sun was really beating down. I did seven hot miles rolling up and over various ridges at the edge of an escarpment. Despite the heat it was really beautiful. I spent most of this section holding my balls to keep away chaff. I met Thomas at the spring and we had fun hanging out. He’s picking up a lot of thruhiking mentality just from one day of exposure (wow I guess I think highly of myself don’t I). I’m looking forward to eating with him tomorrow.

I took off from the spring and played out a huge and well constructed poop. That’s two big poops in one day! I’m nervous when I start to poop more than once. Day of butt chaff. I told Thomas about the Culo Clean. He’s a Spanish teacher, so he got a kick out of the name. :)

I did the math back at Smith’s in Grants. I packed out about 12,000 calories. I’ve eaten most of those calories now by the evening of day three. I’m getting in maybe 3,500 calories a day. That’’s good! I’ll try and push it up to 4,000 before long. This next stretch will be a six-day carry. Packing 24,000 calories would be really hard. But we may very well be giving it a go.

After I pooped I had a really fun four mile walk. I crossed a plain and climbed a mesa. The 400 foot climb was intense. When I got to the top it started raining. I could see sheets of rain moving across the plain in front of me as I walked. And there was lightning too! Northern NM is definitely better than down south. This section has been the best of NM without a doubt. It’s good to be up here. It’s good to be taking some days off. And it’s good to come back with an eye for Colorado.

Post Note

There are a couple of interesting memories from this day. The first is, of course, the pepperoni! I grew up in a pretty culturally stringent community. The flesh of the pig (haha, I like how that sounds) was considered unfit for human consumption. So I never tasted pepperoni pizza, as an example, until I was well into my late teens. And when I did taste it I didn’t like it. When you’re out on trail your body becomes desperate for salt and fat. Pepperoni is the perfect vehicle for salt and fat, and is ideal for trail (but not for your body of course) because it’s highly processed and won’t spoil quickly. This dude Thomas was sharing with me out of a two pound Walmart bag of pepperoni which he’d been carrying for FIVE DAYS(!) in the basking sun of the South West spring. Naturally it was delicious. Never before has a tortilla with a string cheese and like 12 slices of pepperoni tasted so good..

The trail whips you into trail shape over the course of the first month. It does that by strengthening the muscles, ligaments, and tendons you use for walking while simultaneously shredding you of the extra stored fat which had slowed you down. Because you’re lighter and stronger you walk further the next day which the eats away at more adipose (I think that’s right?) tissue. Which then continues the cycle. It’s a positive reinforcing loop! But alas, all good things can’t last. Eventually when your body runs out of extra fat to burn, and if you haven’t been weaning yourself off this fat burn by increasing the amount of cheap calories you’re eating each day, you’re in for a miserable time. On the bike people call this experience “bonking”. You bonk when you haven’t eaten enough and go for a ride and realize a third of the way through that you’re really hungry and now your really tired and now you screwed it up so you’re going to feel this way for the rest of the day, even after you get to eat. But at least with bonking you know you’re going home to experience a full box of pasta being thrown into the pot while you shower and lay down to eat. On trail you’re looking forward to half a bag of gold fish, four squares of chocolate, and three scoops of peanut butter. Maybe an electrolyte mix if you’re lucky.

I’m not sure it needs a name in thruhiking. You don’t need a name for it because it’s so obvious. It’s what everyone is experiencing all the time. I guess breathing has a name. So does heartbeat. I guess it does have a name then.. Hiker Hunger! Hiker Hunger comes on just as your body signals to your body that it can’t keep feeding you from its reserve. And it never goes away. No matter how hard you try to shake it, no matter how far you run, hiker hunger will always be there to rock you to sleep each night. All this is to say that I needed that pepperoni!

You have to be aggressive about what you eat on trail. Sometimes disgustingly so. Despite what the second grader in all of us continues to think, it is not actually fun or rewarding to eat FOUR snickers bars each day because you have to. It’s just gross. I hate snickers. Literally, hikers will describe and differentiate their candy bar consumption with sentences like, “I like the morning bar over the evening bar because the morning bar is cold and hard. It’s a better texture”. Or, “Oh I don’t like Snickers anymore. I ate too many of those on the PCT. I’m a Milky Way man now”.

So you’re not convinced that you wouldn’t enjoy eating four snickers a day? Still wish you could eat whatever you want? Try washing those snickers down with pond water. Or balancing the sugar rush from the snickers with something more substantial like Cheese-Its. You, and I’m talking to the non-thruhike crowd, see us eating four entrees in town at the best restaurant and think “Wow, I wish I didn't feel the anxiety I feel from my location about food”. And then that translates when you talk to us into something like, “It must be amazing to eat whatever you want”. Except we’re thinking, “I feel so bloated and I still haven’t even started by second omelet and I have to keep eating because if I don’t I’ll be hungry in two hours. Even if I do eat all this I’ll be hungry again in four hours. Also, you don’t want to see the bill. You want this?”. We have to eat because it’s misery without it. But, with the need to gorge ourselves when we can because of limited access in the wilds, it’s often miserable to eat.

Subject change!

Remembering Thomas brings up another important cultural aspect of thruhiking. I hear a lot of non-thruhikers refer to my trips as “backpacking”. I don’t associate my trips with backpacking. I associate them with “walking”. You can walk really far each day! Pack light and be ambitious. Thomas’ fear trapped him into a position which was more likely to realize his fear. He didn’t want to run out of food or water, so he carried WAY to much. I mean WAAAAAAY too much. He always, at every water source, filled up to six liters of water. This was true even when he knew there was good water in just six miles. That’s something like 14 pounds of water weight. He had eight days of food in his pack! I had three and a half for the same section. Thomas was backpacking. I was just walking through.

I caught Thomas at something like 10am, because it wasn’t long afterwards which we were sharing pepperoni for lunch. He had just packed camp because he was so tired from the hiking he did the day before. He was on the morning of day six out of Grants. I was on morning three out of Grants. Just like growing strength and weight loss can be a positive cycle on trail, a fear which demands you carry maximum protection from the unknown will destroy you. It will tear your body down, make you slow, addle your brain with misery, and limit your opportunities to learn to utilize what the landscape has to offer you (e.g. food, water, protection, shade, guides).

Dear Thomas,

You were such a kind person to me. Thanks for sharing your food. Because, despite the fact that I was less pained, moving easier, and more comfortable when we met the reality was that I was needing your food to supplement my own. It may have been mutually beneficial at the time, but you were the giver of gifts and I the receiver. I hope you made it up to CO when your girlfriend arrived and had a great time taking things more slowly. Please feel free to pack less so you can walk more. It will empower you.

Best,

Haystack