What’s after the basin, toxic water and when hikers becomes bikers.

Day 58, leaving Rawlins – 27 miles

The Walmart cashier looks just as sleepy as I feel. French bread, cottage cheese, avocado, 2 salad kits, cheese cake, pink lemonade flavoured twizzlers. I’m tired of backpacking food; resulting in a strange resupply. A random selection of things that seem somewhat appetizing to me.

100 miles aftermath

We stick our thumbs out, putting on our best smiles, hiding our exhaustion while the 100 miles are still visible in our faces. We surely still feel every single one of them. But we don’t have to wait long before Mike picks us up to drive us back to where we finished the 100 mile stretch.

Returning to trail after a zero, a rest day meaning 0 miles hiked, I usually BOUNCE back onto trail. But not today. It’s still two more days of barren basin landscape until Encampment. Today we have 18 miles along the highway before we stop to eat our salad kits in a small city park.

Dark clouds roll in. “Thunderstorms until 5 pm”, LAF says after checking the weather forecast. We shoulder our backpacks anyways and leave the picnic table behind.

It doesn’t stop at 5. It keeps pouring down on us, the wind is surprisingly cold and brutal. This doesn’t feel like August, this doesn’t feel like desert. Knowing the terrain ahead, there’s no shelter whatsoever. Full exposure. We just have to deal with it.

Trail magic temptation 

A pickup slows down on the opposite lane. “Are you okay?”, the driver asks. “Yeah”, I smile and I’m not even lying. This is just what it is. Embrace the brutality.

He offers me water and pulls over. “You wanna get back to town? I got 3 hikers in there”, he says pointing at this truck. His name is Steve, trail name Sage (because we’re on Sage Creek Road) and he’s a trail angel. “Oh the rain isn’t so bad”, I say and gratefully accept water and a soda.

We’re doing the road walk south of Rawlins to cut 15 miles. But all the water in the area is… questionable. Alkaline. Salty. Reservoirs that already smell bad from a distance. We’re not prepared, fooled by the multiple blue lines shown on our map. We have to rely on locals stopping to hand us bottled water. And luckily, they do. Thanks a lot, Carbon County, you’re rad!

Steve drives off and I continue bracing the elements. LAF is somewhere behind me.

“Don’t tell me you went back to town with Steve 😄” I text LAF.

“Still here ☔ With a beer 🍻” I smile.

In fact, he supplied her with water and beer then came back to bring her a hat and gloves since she was freezing. What a wonderful human! LAF and I link back up a few miles later. Thanks to Steve we’re no longer relying on hiking all the way to the reservoir for water (33 miles). We debate stopping earlier to camp and for a while we go back and forth, neither of us wanting to make the decision to stop.

A few minutes later I spot a concrete culvert underneath the road that is dry. A perfect sheltered spot to cowboy camp and we both agree on staying. Wrapping ourselves in our sleeping bags to get warm.

Day 59, Sage Creek Road – 34 miles

We wake up late and to a baby blue sky. The weather changes so quickly. More road miles through barren landscape, it’s kinda like a desert. Sandy ground, sage brush, we cross a few creeks and pass some ponds. All of them smell foul from a distance.

Hidden in the sage brush we find full cans of cherry Dr Pepper and Arnold Palmer ice tea lemonade. I’ve never had one before. Construction workers stop their trucks to hand us bottled water, an older couple has apples in their car „in case we see one of you guys“.

This road walk could be boring and depressing, instead it lifts our spirits.

Time to go home

By the time we leave the road and return to our home – dirt trail, the red line – the sky has the color of charcoal. One flash of lightening, LAF turns around to me and we look at each other bewildered. Not far to the tree line.

Thick heavy rain drops start falling. We speed up. But before we reach the safety of tree cover, there’s lightening left and right. In regularly intervals the whole sky lights up. Thunder is growling angrily.

The scent is the first thing we notice. After days in the desert that have felt like an eternity, the earthy scent of forest envelopes us. The trees enclose us like a house, it feels safe and protected after the exposed basin.

In the light of our headlamps we pitch our tents under sturdy trees. We spend the night tossing and turning while the storm rages.

Day 60, Encampment – 19 miles

“Mugwort!” we pass his campsite while he leaves his tarp and soon after he catches us down the trail. We play contact and spend ages marvelling about o-words. “Something we haven’t seen in a while and won’t see for the rest of the trail”, he gives us a hint.

“Contact, 1 – 2 – 3” – “ocean!” LAF and I exclaim simultaneously.

Trail reunion

Shortly after, there’s another figure moving between the trees. A purple clad one, bronze tanned legs. Mosey.

Mugwort and I speed up, wave at her and together we make our way to the highway. A very quiet highway. Just two cars pass us in 30 minutes and we decide to walk up to the trailhead.

From here Mugwort will continue into Colorado while the rest of us plan on spending one last night in Wyoming. While LAF, Mosey and I pose for a photo for Mugwort’s analog camera, a car is honking in the parking lot. Three friendly section hikers offer us hard seltzers, sodas and even to take us to the post office in Encampment.

Hikers turn into bikers

At the post office we meet another sobo, who bought a single speed bicycle off Facebook in Lander and biked from there to Encampment. He ends up gifting the bicycle to the post office clerk Andrea. “Best gift of my life”, she exclaims, beaming with joy. Strains of purple hair fall into her face.

“Wanna come to church with us?”, we ask Stargate. The St Barnacus church in Saratoga runs a hostel for hikers and cyclists, promising a place to rest. We end up squeezing 5 people into the backseat of the truck. And when we get to Saratoga, Inspector and Pistol are already there.

Welcome to Church

The hostel is a beautiful house with a full sized kitchen and multiple bed rooms upstairs. Backpacks are unpacked, wet tents spread out on the lawn, showers run, the laundry machine is filled with piles of dirty clothes. 4 of us head out for a meal of salads, burgers and fried pickles. Which I never had before but they taste so unbelievably good. The only thing more unbelievable are the three insanely good looking fire fighters walking in while we eat. Tall. Tattoos covering their muscled  arms. The three of us giggle like teenagers. What’s this civilisation full of comfort and enjoyment?

Back at the house LAF bakes drunken cookies. A trans America cyclist called Daniel turns up at the hostel and makes pancakes. We sit around the table and talk until we all get tired and go to bed. It’s like one big weird family.

I try to ingrain this feeling. Bury it under my skin. To never forget how good life can be, so that I’ll never, never settle for less.