Day 28: York Ranch Road

This was a long day with very little of interest happening for most of it. I got up, packed up, started walking down York Ranch Road. 14 hours later, I was still walking down York Ranch Road.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad road. It’s a well-maintained and lightly trafficked dirt road. At first, it went up and down some and occasionally slightly left or right with a goodly number of trees lining either side, though later in the day, it arrived onto the (clearly labeled) Open Range, after which it was flat and straight for miles in the open with no trees for miles in any direction. When I saw a view I liked, I was guaranteed to keep seeing it for the next few hours.

There were dozens of cars going in each direction over the course of the day, which is honestly not that bad. Not so many I wanted to immediately hitch to the end of the road, even though it was boring. Some of them slowed down to avoid kicking up dust in my face; some flew by at full speed. Two stopped to talk to me.

The first was a lady who stopped to tell me she had just restocked the homestead porch at TLC Ranch with fruit and water. She was gone by the time I finished thanking her, but I’m guessing she was probably Charity, one of the owners.

There was indeed a bag of Granny Smith apples and a couple of bananas in the cooler at the ranch, along with several tanks of water and a few packs of ramen. There was an outhouse for hikers, but for certain ironic reasons, I didn’t use it. I wanted to stay in the shade all afternoon, but it was early, and I had miles to go and a road to be rode rid of, so I took a packet of chili ramen and made first lunch of it a bit up the road at a more lunchable time.

The clouds started coming in early that afternoon, and I was already being rained on by the end of second lunch. It turned into a full blown storm as soon as I packed up and got into my Packa. A full frontal driving rain that kept me looking only four feet in front of me to keep my rain hood visor between the water missiles and my face. Then it stopped. Closer to sunset and many miles later, the sun actually became visible below the clouds for a while. Indeed, I had a bit of sun on me while I sat in the wide open on the side of the road eating supper.

Right at sunset, a man in a truck stopped next to me and offered me a bottle of unsweet tea, which I accepted graciously. Then he proceeded to talk about everything for the next 15 minutes, and I got his life story. After being drafted #11 to Vietnam, he spent 28 years in the Army, stationed all over Georgia for training, and as a military attache for 17 armed conflicts. Then he became a nurse for a decade, mending people instead of breaking them. Then he retired, moved up a canyon by himself, and hasn’t seen a stabbed, shot, or dead body since. But apparently he’s seen plenty of cougars, wild donkeys, and even the occasional wild llama up in those hills. Thanks for the tea, Mitch Henderson.

It was another 1.5 miles to the county road by twilight. There was a water cache at the sign and I filled up. But this was a relatively busy paved road, and I didn’t want to camp on the shoulder, so I had another 2 miles to go until the trail left the road.

Walking the white line down the side of a long, level paved road at night is a surreal experience. I could see the haze from the headlights of oncoming cars ten minutes before I could even hear them.

At one point, a car lit me up in passing, surprising a small rattlesnake right next to the road. It started rattling at me right next to my foot. I jumped, but I didn’t know which way to jump since away from the snake was into the road writers the car was passing. What tiny glimpse I caught of in the headlights showed it was curled and ready to strike, but I managed to avoid disaster anyway. And I kept hiking down the road in the dark.

There were few enough of those distant headlights that I could see the clouds clearing overhead and the stars coming out. It was 10pm by the time I arrived at Cibola Country Road 42 and the trailhead, so I set up my tent in a sandy patch right next to the turnaround and info board. I didn’t care that cars (and two late night cyclists?) would be lighting my tent up in passing all night. I was too tired to let that keep me awake.

And more importantly, I was done with that long, boring road.

Trail miles: 26.9

Distance to Grants: 72.5 miles

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