Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Day 21: Fording Bubbles! I mean... Fords and Bubbles!

May 11: I woke up and hit the trail a little before 7:00am. It didn't take long before I caught up with both Evenstar and Pez, who I ended up hiking with most of the day. Good times!

Evenstar said she had gotten up very early in the morning to soak in the hot springs. Pez just had to listen to us rave about how wonderful the hot springs were--assuring him that he really missed out. =)


The main obstacle for the day, once again, was the Gila River that required countless numbers of fording. Counting the photos of the river crossings--which seemed like the only reliable way of counting the river crossings--the number added up to 121! One-hundred-and-twenty-one fords! Today! Just today. The number of times the Gila needed to be forded, I was certain, would easily exceed 200 by the time we finished. The number was staggering. At least they weren't difficult fords, though. Just a nuisance. 

Pez really didn't like getting his feet wet and did all sorts of contortions trying to rock hop and avoid the water whenever possible. One crossing where he knew he couldn't keep his feet dry, he hopped across on one foot so at least only one foot was wet instead of both of them. It was rather comical.

Both Evenstar and I had long since given up trying to keep our feet dry. It seemed pointless. I did wear my not-so-waterproof socks to at least keep my feet a bit warmer during each river crossing, but that was the only thing I did about the situation.

Pez, looking for a route across the river that would keep his feet dry. Or at least not re-wet them.

At one point, late the day, I had mentioned having bubbles to Pez and he was shocked--shocked!--that I'd carry something as useless as bubbles. 

"Of course I would!" I explained. "A guy needs to have some fun on the trail occasionally. And anyhow," I continued, "They aren't that big or heavy." While telling him this, I pulled out the small vial of bubbles to show just how small and light they were.

I hadn't mentioned yet that Evenstar also carried a vial of bubbles, but while we were talking, she quietly pulled out her own bubbles and started blowing them. When Pez noticed, his eyes popped out. "You have bubbles too?!"

And Evenstar assured him that, yes, of course she had them.

"All real thru-hikers carry bubbles," I told Pez. 

"It's practically one of the 10 essentials," Evenstar continued.

Pez shook his head. "No! No it's not! You're making this up!"

I turned to Evenstar. "I guess he doesn't believe us, but he'll figure it out eventually."

Pez said that he couldn't believe that he was hiking with two crazy people.

"You're the crazy one," we told him. "You're the one without any bubbles. You know, even Addie has bubbles. I'm surprised you didn't know this yet." 

The views through the canyon we walked were stunning!

We weren't able to convince him that all "real" thru-hikers carried bubbles, but it was a lot of fun trying. And it was totally worth carrying those bubbles if only for this one incident. Evenstar and I got a good laugh, and really, that's what we wanted. =)

The rest of the day was uneventful. It was a long day of hiking covering 19.5 miles according to my GPS. It wasn't my longest day on the trail in distance, but it did set a new step count record for the trail after I logged 48,313 steps for the day.

Passing the 200-mile mark!



Evenstar has trouble figuring out which way to go....





Evenstar is checking out a snake that's sunning itself on the trail. See the snake? See it?! Which is the reason we stepped off the trail...to get around the snake. I don't know what kind of it was. It wasn't a rattlesnake, but we didn't want to disturb it either.

1 comment:

Blogger said...

I'm with Pez, Wet Feet are the Pits!