Gettin' to the Trail


Hello and welcome to our hike! Now, lest you get the wrong impression, let me just warn you that the first few weeks of this hike has been dictated by a myriad of events that cumulated to only one thing- chaos! I am almost embarrassed to be sharing much of this, but in retrospect it's pretty funny, so here it goes. We were to begin hiking Wednesday, April 13th, but our adventure didn't really start in New Mexico- it started in Bellingham, WA where we (Dave, David and Leslie) live.

Now, for those of you who know us personally, you've either known that we were working like doges before we left, or you've seen us drop off the face of the earth and wondered if we were still even friends. Yeah. Sorry about that.... Dave and I really got sucked into work in a way that neither of us imagined. The New Year brought Dave too much work, and brought me 4 different jobs and the task of planning a hike in 3 months that most people suggest should take a year. Hmm. I'm already on the trail as I am writing this and I'm still not finished planning yet.... Add onto that the fact that David (a freshman in high school and 15 years old) was taking special self-paced classes so that he could finish his freshman year 2 months early (allowing him to return in the fall as a sophomore and be eligible to play football) and we've reached stress overload! Add a dash of my emotional tizzy over the whole deal and you've got one serious stress stew brewing. Yikes!

SAT 9th
Needless to say, with all of that going on, there wasn't much time to prepare for the hike. Saturday was to be our last day in the house and we were still packing, getting the carpets cleaned and making a final mad dash to REI for supplies. The trip to REI was an exhausting 5 hour ordeal and a "few things" cumulated to a shopping cart overflowing. It looked like one of those carts that you see when sales clerks are marking entire bins of items on sale, and unfortunately customers thought as much. David fended them off as best he could, but oy!

We returned to the house, threw everything we could into Dave's truck, Dave's dad's truck, and my car, and raced down to Camano Island (about an hour away) where Dave's parents live. We unpacked and took our first break of the day around 7 or 8 pm to relax for 2 hours or so with family. Afterwards, we went back to work unloading all of our gear and separating it out into piles. By midnight we would find that Dave's pile was considerably smaller than mine or David's and that Dave and David were both missing gear. We weren't sure if it was stolen or if we left it at the house during our mad dash to Camano, but we were definitely in a bind.

SUN 10th
The next day we were to leave very early to go to my parent's house in Sagle, Idaho, about 8 hours away- but we were missing gear.... Dave waited for REI to open to call and see if we left a bag of items there (we didn't) and then drove up to Bellingham to our house to see if we left the items there (we didn't), and then drove back to Camano Island. In the meantime, David was repackaging food items and I was on my laptop finishing booklets of information, including the itinerary, for family and friends. We were so far behind that I actually packed my laptop, printer, laminator, and seal-a-meal machine for our dried foods so we could continue to work on things while we were in transit to the trail.

At any rate, Dave's jaunt was unsuccessful, and it was only after the fact that we actually checked the REI receipt and realized that we never actually paid for the missing items!! Well, I guess the moral to the story is, if you are going to fill your shopping cart so full that it looks like the "sale cart", don't leave it unattended! It's likely that the cart was, at some point in time, unattended and people actually took items from it while we were shopping. Kinda funny in it's own right, but I was livid that it set us 12 hours behind and that I wouldn't be able to spend that time with my parents, who I always miss dearly. We finally left at around 8pm, visited Dave's aunt and grandmother in Redmond, and then drove to Ellensburg, WA and crashed for the night. We would have to fix the "missing items" issue in Spokane the next morning since it was Sunday and all stores had closed early.

MON 11th
We woke early and made a mad dash for Spokane, buying provisions at a different REI and at Kmart, and raced to Sagle (where my parents live- about an hour north of Coeur d'Alene), arriving around 1 pm. We spent a few hours visiting and catching up, and then Dave and David got to work on packing so that I could spend a couple more hours with my parents.

In the hiking community there is a debate- to maildrop or not to maildrop- and there are (in my opinion) really good reasons for both sides of the issue. But for our purposes, we chose to go with the maildrop approach. On the agenda was compiling and organizing 26 maildrops (provisions that get sent to us from our "support team") for our trip. So we packed food, toiletries, and lots of other things into many different containers until 4:30. Yeah- that's AM (I'm getting tired just thinking about it!). We didn't have enough food for all of our maildrops, so we will have to improvise up the road anyway, but we were exhausted- so it was good enough. We managed to crash for an hour (poor David didn't even make it to his bed- he sat down on the sofa and that was all she wrote!), and woke up at 5:30 (yes- one hour of sleep) to get ready to go to the airport.

TUE 12th
Tuesday. We were to start our hike on Wednesday, but this day would be all about travel. Here's how the day was supposed to go: drive from Sagle to Spokane; fly from Spokane to Portland, to Phoenix, to El Paso; take the train from El Paso to Deming; and walk about 1/2 mile from the train station to the hotel, arriving at around 8 or 9 pm. Yeah, right.

The drive to the airport and the flights went off without a hitch. One very surreal moment during it all, however, was when we switched planes. Walking off the plane I saw for the first time the name of the aircraft we had just flown on: "Triple Crown". In the hiking community a "Triple Crown" is when a hiker hikes all of the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and Continental Divide Trail. Having hiked the first two trails, this is my "Triple Crown" attempt, and something I have been dreaming about and waiting to accomplish for 11 years now. I haven't been in the best of health the last 2 years, so I just stared at that silly little plane for about a minute, wondering what it meant. Was this the closest I was going to get? Or was it a good omen, and a sign of things to come? I remain cautiously optimistic- it's just my way.

When we arrived in El Paso we had some time to grab a bite to eat. I feel geographically obtuse, as I had no idea that El Paso was a border town, but really enjoyed the different culture and the short time of exploration. We went back to the train station to wait for the next leg of our trip. We were to leave at 5pm, but the train was repeatedly delayed, and we didn't leave until after 8pm. It was the type of delay where every 15 minutes they announced the train would be another 15 minutes late, so we were confined to the station, waiting and hoping that each announcement would be the last. As it turns out, freight trains have the right-of-way on train tracks over trains like Amtrak. Since Amtrak was off schedule, they kept having to pull aside and wait for the freight trains to pass. This trend continued after we boarded, and we arrived at Deming- not at the scheduled 8 pm, but at 1 am. Fortunately Dave and I had the foresight to know that we would not be able to start the next day (did I mention that we were also carrying 25 pounds of maps that I had yet to sort into their respective maildrops?) since we were so late and there was still so much work to do. So we called Roy of AW Taxi and cancelled our taxi ride to the border, rescheduling it for Thursday the 14th.

So here we are, in town at 1 am. We were going to a specific hotel that, when we called, didn't take reservations. Unfortunately, when we arrived, they were booked for the night. And so was almost every other hotel in town. We ended up roaming across the (very spread out) town until 3 am, with our 40 lb backpacks and the 25 pounds of maps (thank you, David!!) in tow. We finally found the last smoking room in town, at the farthest end of town. We're not too keen on smoking rooms, but at that moment we were more than happy to take what we could get, thank you very much.

WED 13th
So this is the day we were to start our trek, but instead we stayed in the hotel a second night and I worked on separating out all of the maps and guidebooks into their respective maildrops. Of course, I didn't start until about 1 pm. I think all three of us had a no-sleep-hangover, and had we started today, it surely would have been problematic. After all, it's important to start a hike right and make sure it goes off without a hitch (never mind the hitch about starting a day late...).

~Leslie