Getting Flash Flooded and Hiking 85 Miles

As we continued walking through the dark, yesterday ended and a new day began. Now we had at least six more hours of walking in the dark until the sun came out for us. I was really looking forward to that and knew that the daylight was going to be a major shift for us mentally. It’s hard hiking all through the night. I know, I’ve done it many times before. But this time it was different because we had no intention of doing this and were doing it entirely to keep ourselves alive.

I could tell that Syrup didn’t want to continuously walk these 56 miles to get to Grants. But personally, I didn’t have another choice. My sleeping quilt was completely soaked by the flood. That meant that there was no way I was going to be able to dry it without a professional dryer and tennis balls. If your quilt gets a little bit wet from condensation, then you can dry it easily in the sun. But once they are soaking wet, the feathers all stick together and the only way to get them to loft is by putting them in dryer. So I was not going to be able to set up camp and comfortably sleep in the cold desert temperatures tonight. I had to push all the way to town to get a room so I could dry my gear.

Because Syrup had been downhill and I had called him and woken him up, he had a little bit more time than me to save his gear. That meant that his quilt was somehow mostly dry still. But all of my gear had been fully soaked and submerge in water.

As we continued to walk through the dark, we made a new plan for the day. That plan involved breaking every one to two hours, whenever we wanted to. If someone was tired and wanted to sit for a few minutes, then we would sit. If you had rocks or dirt in your shoe and had to clean them out, then we would sit. Any opportunity to rest was ok. We were going to need all the rest that we could get. We took many breaks through the night and I had no problem with that at all.

After hours and hours of walking through the dark daylight finally began to break. I felt so relieved. Even though I knew we now had to walk through the entire day and into the night again until we would be in town. There’s no fast way to walk 56 miles with full gear. Especially now that our gear was soaking wet and significantly heavier than usual. It was going to take all day and there was no way to avoid that.

Morale had been pretty low as we walked through the dark. I was lucky that in the flash flood the only gear that I lost was my camp cup and half of one of my trekking poles. I had managed to grab everything in a scramble, even in the heat of the moment. If I had lost my shoes or my backpack, we would’ve had no choice but to SOS out. But Syrup had lost some significant gear. He also lost his camp cup and he lost his rain jacket. Considering how cold it was, and the fact that it was still raining, losing his rain jacket was a bad hit. He was very cold as we were walking in the dark. Then we stopped to fill up on water at one point and he accidentally put his trekking poles down and didn’t remember to pick them back up again.

Obviously we weren’t in a great place mentally so it’s easy to make a mistake like that. All these things combined to hundreds of dollars of gear to lose, plus an incredibly stressful and traumatic situation to be in. I just tried to keep our energy up as much as I could and to reassure him that we were very lucky for the way that things had happened. It could’ve been a lot worse.

Bundled up, walking along the dirt road. Even after the sun came up it took hours to warm up.

My mood improved significantly once the sun came out. I felt new energy and was finally a comfortable temperature for the first time in 10 hours. After a few hours of walking in the sun, it finally became strong enough to dry some of our stuff out. So we decided to take long break so that we could dry our tents and other gear out. Everything was so heavy and was packed away terribly. It would be a lot more comfortable on our backs if we dried some of it out. This is when I realized how wet my quilt really was. All of the down was comped together, and there was absolutely no way that the sun was going to be able to fix that.

Caked in mud, tired, but continuing to truck along the road.

We sat at break spot for a long time, just laying there in the dirt and letting things dry. At one point an ATV drove by us and asked us if we were ok. We explained that we had been caught in a flash flood and were drying our gear out. At this point in time, we were 35 miles from Grants. The guys offered us a ride, and I told Syrup he was welcome to take it. I have a continuous footpath still on the CDT and this situation is not currently life or death. So I have no problem suffering and continuing to walk those 35 miles to town. I know that I won’t be able to get a ride back out here to connect my foot path if I bail out, so I told him there was no way that I was going to take the ride. But Syrup is such a team player he turned down the ride because he didn’t want to leave me behind. I told him he really could if he wanted to and I would be fine, but he insisted.

Laying all of our gear out to dry once the sun finally came out.

I think a lot of other people would’ve taken that ride and bailed out. But that’s not me. The worst of this is over. We’ve already battled through the most brutal hours of this flood situation. Now all we have to do is hike for another 12 hours to get to town. I’ve suffered for too much to bail out now.

After a long break and drying most of our gear out we continued along. It was almost entirely dirt road for the rest of the day, and though it was tedious, it was at least fairly easy. But I think the hardest part was the mud. Because of all of the rain, the trail had turned into a cakey clay-like mud. It grabbed your feet and made it hard to walk. We were slipping and sliding all over the place. It added so much weight to your ankles that my right ankle was now incredibly sore. After a few hours, it became clear that it was significantly slowing us down. That was the last thing that we needed on a day like this.

Eventually it warmed up enough to take my layers off. I enjoyed the cruisy dirt sections of trail, where the mud wasn’t so thick.

As we walked, we continued our routine of breaking every two hours or so to sit down. It really helped to make the day go by faster and to keep morale up. We were getting closer and closer to Grants, I could almost taste it. For once, I was actually looking forward to nightfall because I knew we would be getting even closer to the end. We would have to walk for probably 6-8 hours in the dark though.

In the middle of the day the trail was a dream. A pristine flat path through a pine forest.

One of the things that kept me going over this day was knowing that I could do 85 continuous miles. Just a couple months ago we did the 48 hour challenge, where we hiked 120 miles in 48 hours. The longest break that I took during that time was 45 minutes. Now we were doing 85 miles, which was much less. I knew that I could do this. I just kept telling myself that if I had done it before that I could do this. That was incredibly heartwarming and I really think it made a big difference today. Otherwise I think this might’ve seemed like impossible feat.

This spicy mango candy was so good!

Eventually, it finally became night again, and I was eager to keep going. The mileage was getting lesser and lesser and we were getting close to the road. Syrup was getting tired and I knew he just wanted to stop. But I just kept reminding him that we were close and we had to keep going. I knew that he had a dry quilt so if he wanted to, he could stop. I told him repeatedly that he could if he wanted to. But I couldn’t do that. There was no way that I could sleep comfortably with all of my gear wet. It would’ve been freezing cold.

A huge cdt marker on a gate, just before we got out onto the road at the end of our day.

We walked and walked and then would stop off for a break. Energy was clearly getting very low at this point so those breaks were exhausting. But when we stopped off for the final time of the night, we only had 8 miles left! I knew that would be less than three hours of walking hopefully. Maybe a little more, if we were still moving slow. We took one final break and then got up and began that last push.

There were only a few more miles of dirt trail walking and then we were out onto a road. Hitting the road was such a relief. It was around 2:30am in the morning at this point And pitch black out. We were hoping that when we got out to the road we could attempt to try to hitch the rest of the way to town. Then we could just come back tomorrow and walk these sections of road when we’re better rested. We knew getting a hitch in the dark was going to be hard though.

Walking by the prison at 2am.

This section of road actually brought us by a prison. Which was pretty funny. The downside to that was you’re not allowed to hitchhike in the sections surrounding the prison. So we just had to keep walking for a while. Then once we passed the boundary for the prison and were able to begin hitching again we started once more. And to our surprise a cop car actually pulled over for us when we were about 2 or 3 miles out of town. This has been a bucket list hitch of mine for a long time. So it was definitely the icing on the cake of a really difficult 48 hours.

The cops who gave us a ride the remaining 3 miles to Dennys!

The cops were already heading to Denny’s, which was hilarious. So they just brought us there. When we got into Denny’s, we got a well deserved meal. I was starving because all this walking had made it really difficult to eat as much as I needed to. Once we stuffed our face at Denny’s we headed down the street to our motel. We had called in advance to make sure that we could check in around 4am in the morning. Luckily someone was still there and though it took a while for them to figure everything out, eventually they let us check in in the middle of the night.

Passing by the infamous “no hitch-hiking” sign near the prison.

Then we got to our room and we finally got to go to bed. What an insane 48 hours this has been. At this point I’m just grateful that we’re alive and that everything worked out the way that it did. If I had been asleep when the flash flood hit we would’ve been screwed. Because I was awake I was able to hear everything right before it happened, which gave us critical time to move. If we had both lost our shoes and backpacks in the water then there’s no way we could’ve hiked out 56 miles.