Halfway Reflections on the Arizona Trail

Out of the desert, among the pines. Pinus ponderosawith its orange rind and vanilla aroma. you eat pineKnown for its edible nuts. I look at them as I sit in the appropriately named town of Pine, Arizona, located at the base of the Mogollon Rim. For more experienced hikers, 400+ miles may be just a casual warm-up, but for me it’s 400 miles more than I could have imagined hiking one stretch a short time ago.

The first time hiking is difficult. A shocking revelation, I know. And at the end of a long, hard day, it turns out that one of the last things I want to do is sit down, formulate and type out thoughts for a blog post using the world’s smallest keyboard with a rapidly draining phone battery.

I recently heard an interview with travel and nature writer Ian Frazier, in which he talked about his childhood desire to be an essayist, imagining professional writers just sitting and chuckling as they typed on their typewriters. Deciding to blog has also been a little different than my pre-trail romantic imaginings.

All of this preamble is to say: apologies for the lack of updates to those who have been asking about them!

A lot has happened since my last update over 300 miles ago! What follows is an attempt at a summary with some reflections from the halfway point:

Tragedies come, tragedies go

One of the most difficult aspects of this trail has not been the climbs or the water carries, but saying goodbye (for now?) to all the fabulous people I have met along the way.

Pancake, Atlas Faulkner and Gator (LR)

It happened somewhere while we were climbing Mount Mica in Saguaro National Park. The elusive and infamous stretches of trail I had heard so much about! Standing at Manning Camp, just 4.5 miles from the Grass Shack campground where we had stayed the night before, I watched Gator and Pancake settle in for a Nero while my legs itched and ached to keep going.

I didn’t really want to leave them, but I felt like this parting of ways was coming, that our natural rhythms (along with different time and budget constraints) were destined to diverge sooner rather than later. Of course, just a mile and a half later, with my muscles burning, sore, longing for the summit of Mount Mica, I felt pangs of regret, but everyone has to do their own hike and I’ve accepted that that’s okay!

They ended up abandoning the trail shortly after I left them to return to their happy place on the AT (which they did in the first half of last year). But now I have new friends for life, and they have promised to bring me the magic if I ever decide to take a long walk on the Florida Trail! (Both are from Florida, as the name Gator might suggest.)

All good things must happen. Since leaving my first tram, I have continued to gain and lose new ones, regularly connecting with various groups, friends and couples. We walk and talk for a while, then our rhythms diverge, or plans change, people come and people leave and yeah, it’s okay!

Facebook Famous at Norm’s Hometown IGA in Kearny

Greg, aka Fish (or aka Dish?). It is called that because his friend Adrien fished for water while he served it. Or was it the other way around? Also, the names Fish and Dish must be pronounced with the worst Southern accent you’ve ever heard.

Side quest to Tonto National Monument

And you never know who you’ll meet along the way!

One night while having dinner at Mazatzal Wildnerness with my new friend Levi, another new face came up the trail to join us.

Here’s a brief relevant bio: I’m from Knoxville, Tennessee, went to the University of Tennessee for too many years, and have long had the unfortunate affliction of being a Vols fan. Our new dinner companion grew up in North Georgia as a fan of the Georgia Bulldogs (a Tennessee rival) and played college baseball for Notre Dame; It turns out that we both attended the 2022 College Baseball Super Regional in Knoxville, where the Fighting Irish defeated the Vols team, widely considered the best college baseball team of all time. Unfortunately, our new friend Patrick turned out to be a really nice and awesome guy (I hate when that happens) who currently lives in the Hudson Valley and will also provide me with trail magic if I ever cross the Hudson on the AT.

Brief updates on weather and wildlife

I was wondering when I would see a rattlesnake, and as I crossed the desert from Oracle to Kearny, I got the answer!

He was face down on the other side of the trail just as I was starting to sunbathe, can’t blame him. I’d be mad too if I got kicked out of a great tanning spot just as things were starting to heat up.

At night, above the Gila River, Glenn, Adrien and I watched the silhouettes of desert bighorn sheep wandering along the tops of the narrowest ridges. This was magical. A few days later I saw the tail of the elusive one. puma concolor (a cougar) when it was already crashing into the brush (I have yet to see a fully grown whole body in the wild one day!). I’ve seen bear tracks and scat, and heard coyotes howling and howling at night. And I hope you soon have more to report on wildlife when you enter Elk Country!

A desert horned lizard, it’s not just the charasmatic megafauna!

After receiving unseasonable rains and storms that caused my shoddy, self-made tarp to fail during the first week on the trail, I decided that there really wasn’t a true ultralight monster that I could avoid hypothermia by simply bundling up in a Tyvek burrito wrap. Naturally, it hasn’t rained once since I bought a tent or rain gear, but the peace of mind has been invaluable.

On a ridge in the Superstition Range, I still don’t know how my tent didn’t break down after being hit by gale-force winds in the middle of the night and getting stuck for a couple of hours in the morning waiting for things to calm down.

Phoenix in the background, I thought I would take advantage of the wind by using my tent to paraglide and see my friend who lives in Scottsdale.

Different place, same result the next night and morning: impressed (bad pun) by the superstitions.

Volunteer Appreciation Stand

Exhausted after a barren stretch of desert, I crawl to a cattle tank on the surface. After a thirsty 25-mile day, a sharp beacon seems to radiate light upward illuminated in the dark glow of the desert afternoon. I stand on a rusty barrel to look inside and draw out the exile of life and… my eyes meet a dead bluebird floating in the middle of an almost continuous crust of dead insects on the water. It’s the most putrid stink water you can imagine (you’ll have to imagine, I was too tired to think about taking pictures, but I’ll excuse that by saying that things like this are not suitable for publication). I’m thinking the dead bird was hit by a wall of foul stench floating upward and then spiraled into the tank where it drowned.

After a very tedious backwash of my water filtration system due to said dead bugs and general stench, I had enough water for the night and the next morning and then was able to make the 7 mile trek to the rainwater collector.

There are several crucial rainwater collection tanks and volunteer-maintained reservoirs, without which I’m really not sure how I would complete certain segments without some grueling 6-7 liter water hauls.

The least sinister desert sign

One aspect of writing that I have found difficult is that it is inherently a somewhat selfish endeavor; I have to remind myself that yes, others really do care and will care about what I may say. And when it comes to appreciating the Trail Angel on the AZT, there are already so many other fantastic posts on The Trek, what can I say that hasn’t already been said well?

But there are many things worth reiterating and repeating, so I would like to add my own voice to the chorus of gratitude for all the trail angels and unknown selfless volunteers who make this trail so much more bearable and possible.

Taking a much needed zero and resupply day at a trail angel’s house in Tonto Basin.

I will never meet or know the people who helped build and continue to maintain this facility at Hopi Spring in the Mazatzal Wildnerness, where water can be reliable and unreliable, but I am grateful for their work.