Off to a Good Start on the Arizona Trail

under the juniper

Dead. A corpse at rest. Asleep to the world.

That’s how my first Trail Angel found me.

That morning had been mercifully cool in Sunnyside Canyon, cool enough to make me feel the need to push myself harder than I should, feeling the need to log miles as the mercury subtly rose.

By the time I reached the top of the Forest Service Road junction near Parker Canyon Lake, I was *cooked*.

But then here:
A pile of water jugs under a piñon and juniper tree.

A mirage? No, but also yes.

The jugs were real. The water was not. Checking each of them: empty. empty. empty. empty.

I collapsed in the shade on my crumpled tarp as the winds began to pick up, with dark clouds approaching from near to far. The air began to feel fresh and clean, as if everything was about to be rinsed away. At that point, I stopped caring and became more and more comfortable being a passive actor in the drama of nature’s vicissitudes.

«Hey buddy, you okay?»

My Trail Angel was refilling the water tank for a friend I had just dropped off at the border, saw me lying under the tree, confirmed that I was not, in fact, a dead body, and offered me a lift.

A couple of unwalked miles later, I was at the general store at Parker Canyon Lake Marina, eating Pop-Tarts and an M&M ice cream sandwich, a resurrected man (I’m writing this on Easter Sunday reflection). I know it’s cliché, but the path provides and the magic is real!

Off to a good start

On the way to the Coronado National Memorial, where I planned to walk to the AZT, I looked out the window at the wide, exposed, heat-shimmering landscape and kept imagining that I would have to walk back through it all, taking days to cover a distance I was currently covering in a matter of hours.

Southern Arizona was experiencing a record heat wave. So naturally, I immediately started moving forward along the connector trail from the Coronado Memorial Visitor Center in the afternoon draw.

By the time I walked to the border, backtracked, and then climbed a little higher, thoughts like, «I’m not a recruit in the army, I’m doing this voluntarily for fun?!»

I set up camp in the dark, only to puncture my sleeping pad almost immediately (southern Arizona is full of thorny plants, who knew!). After a pretty miserable first night, the climb up Miller Peak was brutal (exposed, steep, unforgiving. I was drinking water, but not enough. Was it the altitude (reaching over 9,470 feet)? Heat stress? Metabolic shock? Rhabdo, do I have Rhabdo?

With all of these non-hysterical concerns swirling around in my increasingly delusional mind, I still had enough sense to think that I should follow the animals’ lead here: rest under cover (ideally by the water) and move with the angles of the sun following the shady folds of the shifting shadows.

This mindset took me another 6 miles (it helped, it was mostly downhill after reaching the top of Miller Peak), where I found a perfect, flat campsite near Sunnyside Canyon and collapsed into it like I’d been dropped from the top of the mountain.

This brings us back to the juniper tree: It was only day 3, but I was already at a low point physically and mentally. And then, suddenly, salvation! Looking back I’m still not entirely convinced that it wasn’t a hallucination, that maybe I’m still asleep under the juniper tree dreaming of the many kilometers I have left to travel.

When it rains, it pours

Before hitting the trail, I received some not-so-good and not-so-bad advice (in his own words) from a friend who completed the AZT in 2023: Over the course of 5 weeks, it only rained or snowed twice, both for short periods, so why not try a more minimalist setup (tarp, bivy, no rain gear) to save weight in the pack?

To be even more charitable, my own experience living in New Mexico told me something similar, where both cold rains all day and torrential rains were not something that was supposed to happen this time of year. Well, you can probably guess where this long prelude is headed.

I whipped from the record breaking off-season heat until I was a burrito wrapped in my oversized Tyvek sheet like an UltraLight monster in disguise, shivering uncontrollably after slowly and suddenly getting drenched after trying to push up and over Canelo Pass in Canelo Hills.

That night the Tyvek sheet turned out to be barely functional as a tarp, and the wind tore off a pair of grommets that I had placed incorrectly.

At one point, convinced that another storm was imminent, I called my mother to deliver what I felt was a reasonable approximation of a last will and testament, but it was only a light, steady drizzle from which the tarp did protect me.

The next morning, I hiked 13 hot, hard miles to Patagonia, arriving at Terra Sol Campground just in time for the afternoon storms to roll in and unleash hail the size of a quarter.

Here I enjoyed a great dinner with some fellow hikers and bikers, and the campground owner was kind enough to let me sleep on his front porch, protected from the rain.

A trail name!

Here at camp, two fellow hikers, Gator and Pancake, bestowed upon me the name of my trail.

Atlas Faulkner – First because I was teaching Geography and second because absurdly (given the weight of my backpack and concerns about the bulk of a tent and rain gear) I had brought a copy of The Portable Faulkner (ironically, it turns out it’s not that portable).

That night, as the rain pounded on the tin roof above me, I thought of a line by Darl from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying:

“How many times have I lain in the rain on a strange roof, thinking about home?”

I’m writing this reflection from a shared hotel room in Tucson with my new lifelong friends, Gator and Pancake. Yes, I miss the comforts and social relationships of home, but the trail still has so much more to offer, it’s not time to go home just yet.

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