Flagstaff to Pine section. Mixed feelings, mud, cold and pumas.

Statistics:

Miles: 230.6 – 338.6

Days: 10-14

I wanted a walk through the desert. Why the hell is it snowing in my tent?

We started south of Flagstaff on a windy Tuesday. Exit the canyon and enter the land that makes hikers question their life choices: the land of deep potholes filled with brown water. The mud sticks to your shoes, and as you walk, you take half the forest with you: pine needles, grass, and leaves. Then you discard them like old hiker’s «horseshoes.» Rare mushrooms grow from cattle dung.

The cows watch you go by, fighting the wind and the mud, slipping, twisting your ankles, cursing no one. Perhaps you have died and entered bovine paradise instead of human? This is probably what hiker hell looks like: 70 miles of mud from Flagstaff to Miller Canyon.

During the entire stretch, it is necessary to dry the tent at lunch time.

“Ewww,” I mutter as I hit the roof of the tent at midnight, knowing the luggage will be wet in the morning. It’s getting colder and colder.

“There is frost,” says Kez in the morning.

«No, there isn’t,» I complain, half asleep.

«Yes, our store is frozen.»

I touch the roof again and it snows on my head.

I chose to hike the AZT because I wanted a short hike through the desert. And don’t get me wrong, I know it rains in the desert and it’s cold, but I didn’t expect the post-monsoon season to hit me with so much humidity right from the start.

For three mornings in a row, we packed up a freezing tent and trudged through the mud.

Am I following a cougar or is the cougar following me?

The only interesting thing about mud is that you see the footprints of everyone who has passed before you. It’s like a forest trail log that records your presence whether you want to sign it or not.

You start to see stories. These are Thunderbird’s shoes: Their Topos have an all-over printed Vibram sole. And here is Quadzilla with that line in the middle of his footprint. Some coyote, a bear, squirrels. Wait, that was…? I step back. It’s big. It has no claw marks. It’s a cougar. A big one. And a smaller one too. Maybe I should look up and around instead of down…

We stopped at Waldrup Tank to drink some water. It is a brown cow pond, but the drain has clear water. It’s only 3 in the afternoon, but we have walked about 32 kilometers and we decided that our feet can’t take it anymore. You’re supposed to camp about 200 feet from the water to give the wildlife some peace, but we like to camp even further away, to give peace to the wildlife that goes about their wild life at night. About a mile from the tank, we found a gate and pitched our tent next to it.

It’s barely dark when a moose makes its first appearance, but it’s somewhere further away. Silence. Then something creaks next to our tent. What was that? We start talking and the sound stops. We soon hear what sounds like a mix of a panicked squirrel, an angry bird, and a small cat. Kez is convinced it’s a bird. We’d never heard that bird before, but that’s okay, I like the bird theory better. At home, every time the motion light on the stairs went off, I would pretend it was a cat, even if I knew the cat was outside. Sometimes it’s easier to sleep like this.

Suddenly, the “bird” starts screaming like a little girl and we know it’s not a bird. He is definitely a big cat. Shit. It’s close. On the PCT I was told that you never see a cougar, but the cougar always sees you. So I guess staying quiet and “invisible” is not the right course of action in this case. They have already noticed us. We talk loudly among ourselves. I grab my Garmin with the SOS button ready and a Swiss army knife. I’m sure neither of us will help if a cougar decides to invite me to dinner, but I’ll take my chances. Kez brings one of his poles into the store.

The cougar switches to imitating a moose, which would need more practice if it wants to fool anyone. After a while, Kez is snoring, unbothered by the cougar who seems to have moved on. Now only the king moose passes by, making grumpy old man noises all night, as if bending down to eat grass hurts his back.

In the morning, we meet a group of hunters with a large pack of dogs running at full speed in the direction we came from.

“Did you see the comment about Waldrup Tank the day after yours?” Slocahontas asks when we meet her again in Pine.

We hadn’t done it.

Apparently, the night we heard the cougar sounds, a cow was torn apart near Waldrup Tank. A hiker found the body the next day.

Well, I’m very happy that we decided not to stay near that tank that night. Listening to a mountain lion brutally kill a cow is not on my bucket list.

Not so miserable.

«There’s a meadow not far from the trail,» Kez says casually the day before arriving at Pine. We were feeling pretty miserable after all that mud, the restless sleep filled with the sounds of moose and cougars, and having to scrape frost off the tent walls. My arthritic knee is swollen again, making it uncomfortable to bend over for water. There’s a damn little dark cloud above us, the only dark spot in a perfectly blue sky, and of course it decides to start showering us with rain.

The “four cheese wrap”. Or eat the leftovers the day you arrive in town…

We looked at that mead icon on Google Maps and started seriously considering it. Add three miles. It will be dark when we get there. What happens if it is closed? There is no service so we can’t check, and this isn’t the UK; A mead is not a pub where you drink until you pass out and then stay the night. But if it is open, there will be a roof, there will be heat and there will be mead. We don’t even drink much. But there will be no cows, mud or frost.

Pondering that, we climbed a hill and stood at the edge of the Mogollon Rim. The view of the distant mountains in the evening sky, and we forgot about the mead.

I was willing to call this Flagstaff-Pine section one of the most miserable of my modest hiking career, but that view, and everything afterward, redeemed it. Soon we were walking along the Mogollon Rim, and that was exactly how I imagined my “desert hike.” Agave growing in copper colored soil. The morning sun’s rays pass through juniper and pine trees, illuminating the grass and highlighting the bright brown stems of the manzanita bushes.

Finally, my walk through the desert.

At Pine, we met all the hikers whose shoe prints I had been following: Slocahontas, Thunderbird, Quadzilla, and Loose Tree.

Shower, bed, good American breakfast (damn, I love them!), and the company of those guys at lunch, and we’re on the road again. Before we left, a guy approached us and asked if we were going to do the AZT.

«My colleague did it. Maybe I should do it too,» he mused.

«You should,» says Slocahontas. “It will change your life.”

«It will definitely change your shoe size,» adds Loose Tree.

I couldn’t agree more. With both.

Things I learned along the way.

I decided to add this part to the end of my blog posts because I like to learn about the places I walk. I’m not a local, so if you notice I misunderstood or missed something, feel free to point it out in the comments.

1. Aspen trees are unique because they reproduce underground and each tree is a shoot from the root system. A colony can occupy dozens of hectares. To protect the young trees from elk, deer and cattle, we saw fences along the trail.