Scary Summer Camping Stories That Will Ruin the Outdoors for You
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How did the hikers prepare for a 41-mile dry desert section?
I've been walking for a living for almost 20 years now. I'm a land surveyor. Most people hear that and picture a guy in an orange vest standing next to a highway looking through a little telescope. And honestly, that's not wrong. But the part they don't picture is everything else. The part where you park the truck at the end of a dirt road and walk four miles through sagebrush to find a corner marker somebody hammered into the ground back when your grandfather was a kid. The part where you're the only person for ten miles in any direction and the wind is the loudest thing you'll hear all day. I've spent my whole adult life in empty country. And I'll tell you the thing that empty country taught me. The thing this whole story is really about.
Out there, water isn't a convenience. Water is the entire question. Everything else is details. Point is, I know the desert. I'm comfortable in it. I've never been the kind of guy who gets spooked by silence or big open ground, because silence and big open ground are basically my office. I'm telling you all this up front so you understand that what happened to me and Cole didn't happen because we were beginners, or careless, or out of our depth. We did everything right, every single thing, and it almost didn't matter. Cole's been my best friend since the tenth grade. He's a diesel mechanic, works on ag equipment and heavy trucks, and he's one of those people who's physically incapable of doing anything halfway.
If Cole packs for a trip, the pack gets weighed. If Cole plans a route, the route gets printed, laminated, and marked up in three colors of pen. For years I gave him grief about it. I'd tell him nobody on earth needs three colors of pen for a weekend hike. He'd just shrug and say the same thing every time, that nobody ever died from being overprepared. I used to think that was just a thing he said. We started section hiking together maybe 12 years ago. If you don't know the term, section hiking just means you take a long trail, one of those routes that runs hundreds of miles across a state, and instead of doing the whole thing in one summer the way the thru-hikers do, you bite off a piece at a time.
A long weekend here, a week there, Over the years, the pieces add up. It became our thing, mine and Cole's. Once a year, sometimes twice, we'd pick our next chunk of trail, put in for the time off, and go knock it out. We'd done forest sections and canyon sections, and one section in the rain that we still argue about whose idea it was. And a few summers back, the next piece up on our list was the one everybody on that trail talks about, with a certain tone in their voice. The dry section. I'm not going to name the trail or the exact roads, and you'll understand why by the end of this. What I'll tell you is that it's high desert, big basin country, sagebrush and alkali flats and low bald mountains way off at the edges of things.
and in the middle of that trail there's a stretch of about 41 miles where there is no reliable natural water. None. There's a spring marked on the old maps that's been dry for decades, and there's a cattle tank that has water in it maybe two years out of ten, and that's it. 41 miles. In high summer, when we went, daytime temperatures out there run 100 and above, and the ground soaks up heat all day and keeps letting it off long after dark. The heat doesn't really leave when the sun does, it just eases off a little until morning. Now, 41 miles doesn't sound survivable without water, and on your own it basically isn't. Because in that heat, a person needs somewhere around a gallon a day, just to stay level.
And more if they're working hard. And a gallon of water weighs over eight pounds. You can't carry three days of it plus your gear. The load would break you before the miles did. So here's how anybody hikes that section at all. And here's the thing you need to understand for the rest of this story to land the way it landed on us. Water caches. There's a volunteer community around that trail. Good people, mostly older folks, retired ranchers and trail club types, and former thru-hikers who live within driving distance of the dirt roads that cross the route.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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