COOKED. – The walk

Wow, we’re back on track.

Day 1:

Right now I’m sitting in the tent while mom prepares our dinner (rice and salmon). But let’s start at the beginning of the day. MJ, the technical assistant, picked us up at the airport last night. MJ is a mama bear. He prepared breakfast for the 6 hikers who stayed at his house. Delicious blueberry pancakes. He even made my mom her own gluten-free batch. 🥞🫐 There we met some other cool hikers, including Karts. He is doing the Dale Shewalter tribute walk.

We hit the road at 8:45 this morning, heading to Sobo from Superior and hiked 17.4 miles to camp. Most of the day we were looking at saguaros and other cacti. We saw two snakes in our first hour of walking and the second one hit us!

Day 2:

Harder than yesterday. I listened to music for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. It was very hot and I got rashes on my thighs. I put a wet handkerchief on my legs to cool off. I had a package of ramen for dinner. Mom and I saw two snakes again today. One made us ring and the other didn’t. We also saw a pink and black Gila Monster. It was great! I really miss my cat, LoveBug, but I have a recording of him meowing. Read more: ikmj. I’ve heard it 3 times since we started walking.

We walked near the Gila River all day. It was kind of a joke, because it was very hot but it wasn’t easy to access the river and we didn’t even touch the water.

Day 3:

At four in the morning I woke up with a kiss on the forehead! We decided to start walking early to withstand the heat. We were able to see the stars for a couple of hours. Very beautiful and when we turned around we could see Phoenix lights which were also very pretty. As the day progressed, it became harsher and hotter.

There are no snakes or Gila monsters today. But a cactus did attack. Now I’m not just talking about being poked by a little thing. This kind of thing! It stuck to my mother and rolled down her leg. If he pulled out one spike, two more would stick in from below. Then, while I was trying to help her, he broke away from her and became attached to me. So now I have a purple finger from the cactus that bites. And it hurt me a lot. It kind of caught on once it got under the skin. I think the spikes had hooks on the end. This is the one that attacked Landslide and me.

We arrived at our camp after a long day. 20 miles today! I was trying not to get my hopes up, but I kind of did. I was waiting for the water fountain all day. When I looked it was… Would I say green!? And not as cold as the previous one. But once filtered, it looks quite clear when we put a tablet of water in it. It’s called the Beehive Tank.

In short, these first three days back on the track have been hot! We’ve been passing through the AZT lowlands, so there’s not much elevation and I’m cooked!

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