Day 3: Windmill around mile 38.9 to the wash about 2 miles south of Williams Tank, ~25 miles

One of the many things I love about long distance hiking and the state of flow obtained from hours upon days on trail is appreciating the details. A measured pace, ears alert, and eyes wide open offer the hiker time to know a landscape a little better. Not intimately as that of someone who lives there, who stays a long while, or studies a place. But better.

This stretch of the trail is the only 100 miles that lets us get to know the Chihuahuan Desert and the northern most range of the Sierra Madre Occidental. Enjoy it now! You’ll walk through it soon enough.

With this day being a little cooler and my body a little more adjusted to trail life, I appreciated the details of the desert.

If I look around, every few steps there is a flower or rock to admire. Not the over the top abundance of a meadow. This desert is more subtle in its beauty.

Walking through rangelands has offered a few other pleasures today: truck tire water (clean!), barbed wire fences, meeting trail angels, and crossing the Continental Divide for the first time.