Day 2 - And Then We Drink It...

And Then We Drink It...

I arose at 6:00 to see the sun doing the same and made my infamous bland Good Morning oatmeal and rocketed by 7:20. Baby ravens had apparently survived the cold unaided by mom and were screeching away as we passed.

We started across Little Smoky Valley and stopped every hour or so to keep our speed reasonable. The walk was splendidly uneventful. The lack of any sort of independent features humbled us and we slipped into valley mode. We diverted off our bearing a bit about halfway across in order to intersect a curious rock outcrop standing alone on the other side of the valley. We walked with breaks to the rocks, conserving our dwindling water (as it was, not drinking enough).

We reached the rocks, which were larger than we had imagined, around 11:00, and hung out, shade hopping, for about two hours. The rocks provided only the motivated and crafty with shade. I moved from spot to spot, curling up on rocks and in cracks to keep as much of me in the shade as possible, and as I dozed off, Carson and Paul scampered around the other side and rigged a shade canopy with a ground cloth and a trekking-pole. They told me to come and join them, but I was too comatose to hear them, sleeping in my shrinking shade. I awoke later in full sunlight, sweating profusely. Grumpy, I searched for my compadres. I could not find them, so I sat dehydrating in the mid-day sun wishing I had either enough shade or enough water to make the situation pleasant.

Carson and Paul came back, and we bitched and argued about why I had not been thoroughly aroused and informed to participate in the man-made-shade. In the process, either dehydration or increased blood pressure (likely a combination of both) set fourth my first bloody nose of the trip. Wahoo. I dealt with that and we loaded up and plodded off in the dusty heat.

We made decent time stumbling tired through the sage aiming towards a canyon with two topographic options. We debated several times which option would take us to Tank Springs, a spring that we had confirmed dependable two years earlier for the unfinished ending of Leg II. We finally decided to follow the horse sign, figuring the mangy beasts would know where the water was. The packed and dusted horse trail wove us into the scattered piñon and juniper and the foothills of the Park Range. Everyone was getting pretty thirsty, reserving about a half liter in case Tank was dry. We would be in a world of hurt if it was, but we could make it another six miles by night to water at Hicks Station’s springs in the next high valley if we had to.

We rested in the welcoming lengthening shadows of a few piñons, knowing we were close to Tank, but not seeing any sign of water yet. Reaching over his head into his top compartment to feed from his bag of GORP, Carson spilled the contents of said bag down his back and into the deep duff of an ancient piñon pine. We helped him pick up the high calorie chocolates, nuts, and raisins, but stopped helping when he started picking individual oats from the porous pine needles. Food back in bag, we plodded on, running into horses and pushing them out in front of us as we approached where the map indicated the spring was. In uncommon appreciation of the horses, I hoped they were a sign of dependable water.

A bit of a climb led us through some choke cherries, currants, service berries, and other water loving shrubs. We rounded the corner of a thick stand of PJ, tired and thirsty, to behold the mangy Tank Springs, totally fornicated by horses.

“I guess that means we can drink up.” I said.

We dropped packs and spent some time trying to figure out how to pump water from the few square feet of inch-deep chocolate brown stud-pile infused water. In time, we decided to make a bit of a mud and rock reservoir below the main pool. We slightly drained the main pool, flushing it with a little clearer water from the seeping bank above. We let the bank refill the main pool and then overflowed that into our deeper reservoir. The reservoir filled in about ten minutes, and, hoping for the best, we wrapped a t-shirt around the acorn filter and began pumping.

The pumping soon got quite difficult and the pump (our only pump, and our only filter) eventually seized up after about a liter. This was decidedly not very good. Frightened, we took it apart to take a look at the filter. In the past, we have used standard filters for our pump, which, when you extract them, show you the riffled surface of the filter itself. When this white surface becomes soiled and brown, the pump is shot. This filter, though, was a new super-deluxe filter that had an additional filter screen that wrapped around the riffled primary filter. It had been used once in southern Utah a few months previous for a few liters, but was still very white and clean when we packed it for this trip.

We extracted the filter, and the outer screen was still stark white, just as wee had packed it. All three of us huddled closely over the filter, and Carson cautiously peeled back the outer screen, and we quickly learned that the super-deluxe extra screen was not an indicator of how clean the real filter was.

“Ohh…fuck…” He said gravely in a quivering tone you don’t hear when things are OK.

He exposed the surface of the main filter and it was a blackish brown, spotted with mold. It was the dirtiest filter I’d ever seen. Our hearts dropped into our thirsty bowels.

Paul and I gawked in relative silence at the filter for a moment. The rough edge of reality had hit us hard, and after a bit of disbelief and anger, we sat down next to the mud hole to talk about our options.

We could:

1. Try forcing more liters out of the pump, possibly contaminating our water or breaking the pump

2. Continue on, without a pump, boiling all of our water before drinking it

3. Continue on, depending upon our combined 23 liter supply of iodine tablets

4. Swallow our pride of a non-supported trip and try to call in another filter via cell phone to be rendezvoused to us at Hicks Station

5. Call off the trip and head back to the car about 17 miles back

6. Die of dehydration, waterborne illness, and general bad luck

There were obvious breaches of common sense in options one through three, and significant breaches of pride in options four through six. Thirty minutes of reasoned discussion led us to get a few fires going, set up camp, and start boiling water. I cleared out the dugout of a foundation of an ancient cabin about 60 meters through the trees from the spring and started two fires. Paul and Carson discussed what to do, sitting next to the spring. I got a nice bed of coals going and started the first pot of brown soupy water boiling. The water was too murky to see the bottom of the small pan, and as it boiled it smelled of fresh horse dung. As the pan cooled the first bed of coals, I stoked the second fire to get another hot bed. I switched the pot after about ten minutes, and it began to boil on the second fire. I re-stoked the first fire and continued this ad naseum.

Carson and Paul returned. We sat around the fire and Carson finally said what needed to be said:

“Besides pride…” He paused. “…Is there any reason that we shouldn’t call in another filter?”

Paul and I thought for a good while and agreed that there was not.

With that, Paul and Carson took Paul’s phone and headed up the side of the canyon to get up on a ridge. It would be a slight miracle to get reception out there, 40 miles from Eureka, 70 miles from Ely and 80 miles from Tonopah, with mountains between us and all those places. If there was a dead spot anywhere, it ought to have been there.

I remained within the bubble of light in the PJ, tending the fires and thinking about death, sickness, pride, and all sorts of hypothetical outcomes. I was suddenly humbled more than I have ever been by the elements, so dependent upon them for my acceptable survival and my uncertain future.

* * *

They returned within thirty minutes and said that they got through to Curt, and that he was going to meet us at Hicks Station the next day with a new pump or a new filter around 3:00pm. This firmed up our future quite a bit. We settled in for the evening and the water processing procedure began to develop.

However, first things were first; we needed to eat. We drank most of our reserve water and decided our cheese filled noodles were the best choice of food for the evening. I poured the dry noodles into the second batch of boiling water and cooked them on the fire in the scuz, hoping the noodles and subsequent cheese sauce mix would mask the dung overtones. It worked well and we eagerly ate the amazing soupy noodles as we began the lengthy and laborious process of refilling our water supplies.

None of us had ever had to depend upon boiled scuz-water for hydration before, so how exactly to go about the process was up for creative development. After we dispersed into the dark woodlands in search of good wood, we brought back a few good loads of juniper and mahogany. We had two aluminum pots, one bigger than the other. The smaller pot was used to boil the water for twenty minutes, and after it had, the water was poured into the other pot to cool and settle. Settling was very important here - there were a lot of 'things' in the water. The small pot was refilled in the pool and put back on the fire. After the boiled water had cooled enough to put into bottles, it was poured through a camp towel into a nalgene where its true clarity and quality could be assessed in full for the first time. From cold murky pool to warm murky nalgene, the process took about 45 minutes with good fires. The resulting water had a very interesting tase.

“And then we drink it. Mmmmm.”

The first few batches were immediately consumed since we were quite dehydrated. Manning the scorching mahogany fires contributed to this dehydration, but we eventually began to fill our bottles with this tinted, smoky and organic flavored water. These festivities continued late into the night. We had had enough around 12:30am. The fires were left to die beneath the clear sky and waxing quarter moon as we stumbled exhausted, dirty, and satisfied with our efforts to the tent to greet unconsciousness.

The second day was our first real day 'in the nowhere’. To awake and retire in such a setting puts one at the true mercy of the elements of the landscape. Considering the rugged and unforgiving nature of the central Great Basin, the day had definitely been representative of the landscape we were in: rough. We had been stripped down to the water-dependent and weak little creatures that we really were, and always had been. We were reminded how un-evolved we were for unassisted travel, yet also how enjoyable truly living by your wits can be, even if only for one night.

The next day, we would swallow our pride and scuzzy water and rendezvous for a filter re-supply. We would continue through yet another disappointing realization and end up deep within a landscape we had never seen, about to discover some of the most beautiful landscapes of our journey.

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