Day 0: Welcome to Lordsburg, NM
Greetings from Lordsburg, New Mexico!! The CDT requires a fair bit of travel just to get to the southern terminus, a journey that for most begins with arrival in Lordsburg.
Shawn (henceforth to be referred to as Hot Mess) and I set out from my parent’s home in northwest Iowa in the wee dark hours of the early morning on Tuesday. I’d lie awake much of the night listening to the wind rip through the barren corn fields and watching flashes of lightening light up my childhood bedroom.
A storm system was moving through the area and we’d be lucky if there weren’t significant flight delays or even cancellations. Our minds were running through contingency plans.
This scenario was not too far from our experience heading to the start of the PCT in 2018, when we’d been very lucky to thread the needle between two winter snowstorms in the area. Now we wondered if we could thread a weather window once again.
Luckily, despite the wind and rain we’d heard all night, the drive to the airport in Sioux Falls, SD was relatively tame. Mostly light rain other than a couple short downpours. By the time we arrived at the airport, the rain had subsided.
No bueno.
All checked in and our ‘sharps’ (tent stakes, pocket knives, etc) checked through to Tucson, we watched the radar as we waited for our flight. Rain, lightening, and thunder came and went. The satellite images showed swaths of purple and blue interspersed with long cells of bright yellow (the bad color on these particular images) moving northeast across the Midwest. Not good.
But, as luck would have it, we were able to catch just the right break in the clouds and take off for Denver. Soon above the clouds, it was an uneventful flight of Sudoku puzzle solving.
I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was probably aliens.
By the time we touched down, our next flight was already delayed, giving us even more time to grab Chick-fil-A for breakfast, healthy eating now mostly in the rear view mirror. Hot Mess had also discovered that he’d left his headphones back in Iowa, so he picked up some cheap wired ones at the airport. Already leaving things behind, this can’t be good.
After a few more flight delays, we were soon in the sky once more, bound for Tucson, AZ. The skies over Colorado were a bright radiant blue. Far below us, the snow covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains stretched northward. If all went to plan, in two+ months we’d be back here, hiking through these mountains on foot.
See you again soon, Rockies.
After touching down in Tucson, we collected our checked bag, checked into our hotel, and spent the next several hours making our way around the city to collect all the last things we needed for the trail - mostly our first supply of food, as well as fuel canisters and lighters. This took much longer than we would have expected, but soon my haul was sorted.
Don’t worry, I’m having salad for dinner.
All of this gets packed into a food bag, which looks like this:
One liter water bottle for scale. Don’t worry, I’m bringing more water than that. The Fritos are special, they ride on the outside of the pack.
During our repacking and organization, Hot Mess also found his headphones in the checked bag. Mystery solved. Now we have plenty of headphones.
Having sorted ourselves, it was time for dinner, where we were fortunate to meet up with some of our favorite fellow PCT 2018 thru hikers, Rainman, Pilgrim, and Bang. We had met and hiked with all of them at various points along the trail, often finding each other in random towns or trail angel homes after hundreds of miles without seeing each other. Trail reunions may be one of my favorite things about thru hiking.
Rainman and Pilgrim both live in Tucson, but it was complete luck that Bang was there. Having just finished hiking the Arizona trail with Pilgrim, he was headed back to Maryland the next day.
Anyway, his presence meant that we were able to recreate one of my favorite trail photos.
Here we all are in the tiny outpost of Belden in northern California; dirty, weathered thru-hikers. From left to right: Rainman, Hot Mess, Butters, Pilgrim, and Bang.
And, the epic reunion:
A little less muscled and dirty. Still somewhat weathered. Bang was nice enough to remove his shoes for consistency. The dirt/tan lines, however, could not be recreated.
Seeing these guys was the best trail send off we could have possibly asked for - sharing stories from the PCT, including sketchy hitches and many of the other characters we met on trail. It’s possible we’ll see them along the trail somewhere, as they each have various trips to Colorado planned this summer.
This morning we were up early to finish up our final packing and hit up the hotel breakfast buffet. This particular buffet was lucky we didn’t have hiker hunger yet.
After breakfast, we loaded up and headed to the Greyhound bus station, which was just under a mile walk from our hotel. Slinging my pack on my back, I quickly realized I was in for a harsh reality in the first several weeks of the trail. While we’d done quite a bit of backpacking since the PCT, it had been awhile since I’d hiked with a full pack loaded down with gear, four days of food, and nearly four liters of water. Soon, there will be much pain to sort through.
Downtown Tucson wasn’t really much to look at, but it had a lot of fantastic street murals.
Despite the very abysmal 1-star reviews of the Tucson Greyhound bus station and its service, as well as some posts noting that it was nothing more than a parking lot, we arrived to a clean bus station and a very friendly security guard. When he saw us at the front door of the station, he opened it and joked “sorry, the Continental Divide is closed today.” This was a common route for hikers to head to Lordsburg, and our packs were certainly a dead giveaway of our destination.
Inside the station, we met a couple others heading to Lordsburg for the CDT. Losa (real name), was from Tacoma. He’d done quite a bit of hiking but had never done a thru hike. He was still uncertain whether this would be a thru hike and was just playing it by ear.
We also met Scout (trail name). She had hiked the PCT twice - 2011 and 2019 - and was thinking about hiking it a third time, but decided she should branch out. Like us, she was doing the trails in order of interest. This in mind, she wasn’t sure that she would ever do the Appalachian Trail.
Actually, we were hoping to take the Amtrak to Lordsburg, but it only runs every-other day and there was no train today. So here we are.
Again, despite terrible reviews of late, hot, and smelly Greyhound buses along this route, we boarded a clean, air conditioned bus, which left as scheduled. Lucky day, I guess.
The trip to Lordsburg was an easy drive down I-10, the interstate nested between large expanses of flat, barren desert peppered with sagebrush and other short grasses. Mountains in the distance. The air hung muted and cloudless.
Soon we will be hiking through similar terrain.
At a glance, these barren landscapes often seem desolate and featureless, but when we hike through them, we see so much more. The desert holds an incredible amount of plant and wildlife life, along with some truly amazing scenery. Hiking through the desert on the PCT, I remember being hot. Thirsty. Tired. Hungry. But I never remember being bored with my surroundings.
The bus we were on had originated in LA and would continue to Dallas, but our short leg to Lordsburg was only about two and a half hours and one time change. Back to Mountain Time.
Lordsburg is exactly the type of middle of nowhere town that you find strung along these long trails. The bus pulled in behind a McDonalds, the driver pointing out to those that were continuing along the bus journey that there would be a 30 minute lunch break. The options were McDonalds or the Family Dollar across the street.
There is no food here. We checked.
This was the end of the road for us. We grabbed our packs, bid Scout farewell until tomorrow, and walked down the road to our hotel. Lordsburg at a glance looked slightly dilapidated, dusty, and a bit sleepy at this early afternoon hour.
Other than a quick stop at the grocery and a trip to McDonalds for dinner, we spent the day as we would any rest day along the trail: relaxing in bed watching whatever movies we could find on TV.
You can’t handle the truth!
Tomorrow we’re up early for a shuttle to the border. Yeehaw, here we go!