Day 1 - Off the Grid

-Off The Grid-

Awoke confused at 4:00AM, and made breakfast; 2 eggs, some bacon, and a bowl of soggy granola. It seems that good things tend to start with granola. Did a bit of last minute packing and hit the road. The previous evening was a time of serious uneasiness and doubt. I kept assuming that we’d never return, that we would all die, and that I needed to say all of my goodbyes.

We picked up Paul, talked to his mother for a spell and then topped off the Suzuki on gas. I bought me a pair of cheap sunglasses, as I had recently lost my other pair, and headed up Murray Canyon. Made it to the top of Murray and remembered that we wanted to bring the Nevada gazetteer in the car in case one of us needed to return to the car and navigate to the site of some horrific accident. Not assuming a horrific accident was eminent, wee backtracked the 8 minutes to get the gazetteer just in case. All of this set upon a backdrop of Moby’s Play and Oasis’s What’s the Story Morning Glory.

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Some might say that sunshine follows thunder
Go and tell it to the man who cannot shine
Some might say that we should never ponder
On our thoughts today ‘cause they all sway all the time

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You might run on for a long time
Run on, ducking and dodging
Run on, children, for a long time
Let me tell you God Almighty gonna’ cut you down

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We arrived at Big Louie spring, the pitiful cow trough which I had last seen in the dying evening light almost two years ago with a heavy heart of foregone yet unrealized adventure. It was 8:00 on the nose, and we allocated trip food and packed up. Threw our packs back in the car, and set up camera for an arrival shot. Spent another ten minutes shooting said shot and shooting a few more scenes at the tank.

We hit the trail by 8:30 and hiked solid for an hour or so, most of it on a two track.

Had a bit of controversy over how to hit a little saddle, but made it over with a good stint of steep and thick bushwhacking

through some neat rocky escarpments. We saddled at our mark, getting a decent peek at the terrain to come, and descended the west side a bit to a good shade hole for lunch. Carson, who you could call our Water Guru for the trip, had studied the map enough to understand that our first essential water source could be dry. He discussed alternate options with us. We resumed our trek after about an hour lunch and slid into a bit of a high narrow valley in the Pancakes.

There was significant horse sign in the valley, and at a point, the horse trail we were following broke off of our westerly course and headed to the north. Our ‘water’ was a few more miles west, over another saddle and in the foothills of the next valley. The horse sign suggested to us that water might be to the north, and Carson confirmed a seasonal spring about a mile up. He volunteered to side trip down the horse trail to get enough water for us to scrape by for the next day and a half if the next spring was bust. He left, pack on, and Paul and I retired to shade of a lofty hedged juniper, kicking off our boots to rest up.

It’s been a while now, he must have found some water, or lost his mind and kept walking into the endless country to the north…

* * *

[insert Carson story]

Carson returned in one hour and fifteen minutes, and had found and pumped five liters. We gathered in a circle in the afternoon sun and all stared at the slightly yellow colored water of a nalgene. Carson took off the lid and smelled it.

“Hmm, it’s got a…a pleasant nose. Slightly hydric…it’s a little wet.”

He took a swig, “Tastes like water” and passed it to Paul, who also took a cautious sip.

“I don’t know what arsenic tastes like, supposedly it’s tasteless…” Carson said as Paul swished it around a bit. He passed it to me like a bottle of whiskey.

“It’s a little flat. I think you should go get some more.” I added.

All of us deemed it high quality H₂O, “The elixir of life”, despite it’s color, and we continued. We came upon more horse sign, and this sign eventually developed into real live horses. We pushed them out ahead of us and to the sides as we strolled along through the notably abundant and beautiful forbs and wildflowers in the grainy granitic soil. We saddled the west ridge of the small high valley and followed the intense horse sign down to the nuked Sand Spring, which had been our essential water source of the day before Carson deviated to play it safe. Paul and I made a bit of a pool in the Horse-poo-mud-mortar and waited for it to flush with clear pumpable water.

We pumped our packs to full capacity (about four liters each) in preparation for the evening’s dry camp and the Little Smoky valley walk that would greet us the next day. I put on sandals, Paul put on his tennis shoes, and we wandered down the two track out of the piñon and juniper forested foothills for a few miles to the edge of the trees. The valley stretched before us in full in the evening light, and we found a sandy place near a wash amongst some large granite boulders to camp. Pitched tent and started a fire by 5:30.

We cooked up some couscous-tater-TVP hash (which, if you might doubt it, is quite delicious) on the coals of the finest juniper. As we ate, Carson discovered three newly born ravens in the top of a nearby juniper, and we all took turn crawling up to admire them. They were very newly born, quite nasty, and looked more like archaeopteryx chicks than ravens. Momma raven was nowhere to be found, not even circling, and she never did come back, as far as we could tell.

We sat around the fire a bit, and Paul decided the day had been good, and, to the surprise of Carson and I, extracted from the depths of his pack a one liter travel-lite plastic bottle of Canadian Mist. It made it’s way once or twice around, and shortly thereafter we hit the hay.

It was a good day. My feet were a bit sore and I thought I could smell a blister coming on, but the last scrawled sentence in my journal reads:

“I’m happy to be out in the nowhere.”

The next day would bring bright and early oatmeal, a good long walk across Little Smokey Valley, and, unbeknownst to us as we slept, an error that would force us to take drastic measures to keep the trip alive.

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