AZT 2025 5/8-12

May 19, 2025 Catwater 2025 Catwater Hikes, Catwater 2025 AZT

5/8 14 miles Summerhaven/Mt Lemmon to Oracle

I really enjoyed the Mt Lemmon Lodge in the cold weather. This time of year, not many people here in this beautiful wood lodge so there’s no place open for dinner, just breakfast and lunch, but the general store across the street has food to heat up or you can save lunch for dinner. It all worked out.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the old AZT route ahead is good trail, has less pointless up and downs (PUDS) than the current official AZT, and exists on the AZT paper maps from 2022. It does not have anything more than a dotted line on the FarOut app. So I walked it, the Oracle Ridge Trail to the AZT to Cody Trail #9 and another 3 miles to walk into the town of Oracle where I got a room at El Rancho Robles. This stretch dropped down from the mountains into the flats and increasing heat. As I popped out on a road in town, Gary, a local trail steward, stopped his truck and offered me a lift the short distance to the rancho. When I checked in, I asked Judy where the nearest food was. She offered to fetch up a burrito and bring it back to me. When she returned she handed me Dos Equis beer with a real lime to slice. Perfect day!

5/9 13.8 miles

The combination of hauling a bunch of water weight and the increasingly hot day was a bit scary. After getting within 4 miles of the next water source, as I planned, I nearly passed out setting up my tent in a soft, sandy wash. I’m hydrated but there is no shade in this version of the desert so I really can’t cool my body temperature much except by stopping moving.

5/10 12.1 miles

The heat is hard! I started at 6:15 uphill, in wind, that helped, but by 10:30 it’s killer, no shade.There are bunnies and deer today. And cows. Hit my last water source, loaded up then walked uphill a few minutes to leave the cows and bees surrounding the water tank. I’m sitting in my tent, the only shade, sweating and waiting for the sun to set.

Stupid cholla cactus balls everywhere! They stick to my shoes. Then somehow I got 1 stuck to my wrist and watch. Painful and hard to get multiple spines out at once. My wrist is a bit inflamed and bruised.

I just can’t do the miles in this heat. I get a bit dizzy despite proper water intake.

5/11 15 miles Mother’s Day

I met hikers today! At a water source, German couple Simone and Nils were heading south to then head east on the Grand Enchantment Trail (GET) for about 3 weeks. It started cloudy and less hot and mostly flat today. I made a few more miles because it’s less effort than walking uphill. I needed to get to a junction where there was a roundtrip of 0.6 to a cow trough full of clear water.

And I’m sweating in my tent looking ahead at the options to get into the town of Kearny that has a reputation for being hiker friendly!

AZT 2025 5/1-5

May 7, 2025May 7, 2025 Catwater 2025 Catwater Hikes, Catwater 2025

5/1 8.8 miles

Because of the requirement to camp at designated campgrounds in Saguaro National Park, the extreme heat and the 14 miles of relentless, steep uphill, I decided to camp just before the park boundary.

I also carried 5 L of water again. Today was flat. Tomorrow begins more insane ups like Day 1. I plan on 5 days to Mt Lemmon and the southernmost ski area in the US @ 9000’ where it is reputedly always much cooler than Tucson.

5/2 9.3 miles

Well shit, camped early again, too much uphill! But for the first time on this trail, I camped near other people. On the way up I met Dawn, a section hiker! We camped at Grass Hut CG and found the few remaining pools of water to refill our bottles.

5/3 15.6 miles, 6:15-5:30

I was woken at 9:30 pm last night by headlamps and loud voices, a couple had just hiked in to the campground in the dark and obviously didn’t see my tent slightly tucked away. “I’m trying to sleep!” I yelled after a while. A woman’s voice started babbling apologies about not seeing me and I just let her run out of steam and then they quietly finished setting up camp. I had to walk by them in the morning to get on the trail so I tiptoed by. Dawn had gone by before me anyway.

It was another brutal day. 6 more miles uphill past the other designated Saguaro NP campground, Manning Camp, another beautiful, historic set of buildings. Then the rest of the day was pretty much downhill on loose rock and gravel. At least I could breathe while slipping my way down to the lifesaving water cache at Redington Road. I gathered my usual 5 L to get me through tonight and tomorrow, walked across the road and found a lovely cow flattened tent site with some wind breaking thorn trees. Not too much noise from the road, and just a little gunfire in the distance.

2 miles before the water cache, I walked down into a sandy wash as a ranch truck towing a horse trailer was backing up to the trail crossing. Simultaneously, a burro bellowed and got to her feet. I’d been following a set of smallish horseshoe prints and a large trail runner shoe print since the other side of Saguaro NP. 6 cowboys got out of the truck and said she’d collapsed earlier and refused to get back up and go on. Her human (who didn’t ride the burro, but walked alongside her) called for help so they were going to load her up and help her recover.

5/4 10.4 miles

I’m worn out! I got to Molino Basin CG where the trail crosses a highway running between Tucson and Mt Lemmon/Summerhaven (way uphill). The campground is closed for the summer because it’s supposed to be too hot to camp. Of course today the weather has been threatening rain and cold, with near freezing temperatures predicted higher up the trail, as was the weather prediction days ago. As I walked, I kept devising plans and alternate plans. My first idea was to camp at the campground, then hitch up to Summerhaven in the morning and take a double zero to recover and let the weather ease up. Or second, hitch down to Tucson and Uber up tomorrow. Nowhere in my plots was I going to keep hiking straight uphill into weather.

I wandered a bit and Wally, the CG host, thought it’d be a lot easier to hitch into Tucson than uphill. So it took a while but finally Michael, who’d been day hiking while nursing a climbing injury, came back to his parked car and gave me a ride downhill. I googled a $99 hotel, washed up, put on warm clothes, ate dinner at the hotel, and scheduled an Uber for checkout time the next day. Platinum blazing again, what a wimp.

5/5 zero

I checked in to my 3rd floor room at gorgeous Mt Lemmon Lodge and watched the snow fall from the window.

Dust and Dreams

May 6, 2025 Catwater PCT 2016

December 16, 2017

At the border between Colorado and Wyoming I had had a brief talk with two guys who were about to hike the Colorado section of the CDT SOBO, they’d done Wyoming the previous year. One of the guys jabbed his thumb at the other guy and said, “He loved Wyoming, I hated it,” and that statement stuck with me because I was so sick of Colorado, and was so looking forward to different terrain in Wyoming–the Red Desert, the Wind River Range. And a night and day later, the country WAS different and I joined the Fans of Wyoming club. The CDT is a weird beast and state lines are imaginary lines drawn by surveyors, you’d think. So how could Wyoming be so distinctive from Colorado? I didn’t know much about Wyoming before hiking through it, in fact I had to buy and mail myself a road map so I would have a clue. I’ve read all the Craig Johnson novels in the Longmire series and watched the whole TV series, that’s about it. But of course Wyoming figures prominently in the history of the American West. What I will research over the winter, what I want to know about, are the first people who were here and the people who are now on reservations. The little towns I’ve visited in Wyoming present as overwhelmingly white, and since I’m a white person you’d think that would not be uncomfortable. But when I went home and landed in Anchorage, Alaska, my home for 25 years and walked through the airport, I realized that was the reason Wyoming felt odd, it was white. In ANC I was home–the concourse was filled with Alaska Natives of all affiliations, and Pacific Islanders, and people speaking assorted European and Asian languages. I have often told the story of the first phone call home from my white boy son 3 days after he went to college in Bozeman, Montana. “Mom? It’s so weird here, everybody is white.”

I took it in steps, leaving the trail unfinished, like the neighborhood kid game we used to play called “Mother May I?” Yes, you may take 2 baby steps–2 nights in Dubois, WY. Yes, you may take 1 giant step–1 1/2 hour shuttle ride to Riverton Regional Airport. Yes, you may take a flight to Denver. Yes, you may fly home to Alaska.

It would have been easier to justify to myself if the weather was horrible or I was injured. But what I wrote in my journal was:

1. I am exhausted.
2. I am depleted, even the tightest pair of jeans I’ve ever bought, hang on me.
3. I’m lonely hiking on my own.
4. Winter is coming.
5. I have to go volunteer in Yosemite.
6. I miss my cats, um, and my husband and friends.
7. I have no voice, I have to get my vocal cords scraped again.
8. My ankle has not healed from rolling it in Colorado in June.
9. I have to train to RUN the NYC marathon November 5.
10. My sleeping bag stinks even though I use a bag liner.

These are all true. But it’s no easier to be a quitter. I can’t call myself a thru hiker any more. Oh wait, I just call myself a hiker anyway.

AZT 2025 4/25-30

May 6, 2025 Catwater 2025 Catwater Hikes AZT

This is a “rollover” gate to make it easier for bicycles than some kind of latched gate

4/25 zero

4/26 15.1 miles

The water issue again. I hiked till there was a source, then I camped. Today I saw 14 cows, 2 day hikers and a cyclist going the opposite way of me.

4/27 14.1 miles + 1

Just a little bonus mileage for today since the FarOut AZT app didn’t show the icon for a gravel road to trail junction. Fortunately when I realized it, I saw an old abandoned ranch road and traversed it back to the trail past a cow pond water source.

There are these resupply boxes, bear lockers, periodically near trailheads, stocked with gallon bottles of water for hikers, some private, some for any hiker.

After the first one, 6 miles in, there were a series of very cool historic plaques. Generally you only run across these where a project has occurred that required disturbing or destroying federally designated and protected historic properties on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Tear down old historic buildings or infrastructure and “mitigate” the negative impact to the historic property by installing interpretative displays describing what used to be there. Santa Rita Water and Mining Company invested massive amounts of money in 1904-5 to build a hydraulic gold mining system. Turns out there wasn’t much gold here so the project was abandoned. Guess there weren’t any Mini g Geologists in those days. Anyway I love old rusty objects and other relics of human activity and the interpretative signs along the way gave me a lot to think about.

I went through another gate, and leaned against a little tree when I saw another first coming at me: 4 people riding donkeys! Donkeys?? Plus 1 on a horse.

4/28 12 miles

Including carrying 5 L uphill the last 4 miles to camp. And more cyclists, cool!

4/29 13.5 miles

AirBnB Joanne got me from the trail and I’m staying in her spare room in Vail. She has a wonderful dog, Hachi. It was a super hot day walking down into cartoon perfect desert, flat. All I saw today was 2 day cyclists and 5 horse riders. Tonight a Big Alaska Snowboard & Freeski Club Board meeting via Zoom. I washed up and put on an Aloha shirt with a fern background on the screen, but was so tired, I barely said a word. Lucky Board members!!

4/30 10 miles slackpack

Joanne dropped me off and picked me back up later in the day. Pretty quick miles in the flats. I saw a runner, a cyclist, 2 bunnies and 1 squirrel. The FarOut app was confusing again as I tried to find the Colossal Cave gift shop to pick up my resupply box. 2 tourists tried to help, then a park guy stopped on the road and gave me a ride off trail in time (before 3 pm closing!) to get my box.

“Thanks bro, what’s your name?” I said to the young guy.

“Mike,” and a handshake.

“I’m Catwater, and you’ll wanna wash that hand now,” I said with a grin.

I got my box, ordered a prickly pear margarita and a pretzel dog—delish! Then Joanne got me, we went shopping at Safeway, and I settled back in at her air conditioned house with Hachi, a guest dog, Cholla, and an IPA.