Day 8: Silver City, NM, 0 miles, ~144.5 total

To get our three day average back down to 20 miles/day we took a zero day today. Thankfully, our bodies feel pretty good the morning after 32 miles of walking in (with a third of those miles on asphalt).

Silver City is a charming place to take a rest. A historic western town with a blend of natural resource use and ranching, artists and co-ops, poetry slams and bike races. Surrounded by pine forests and rangelands.

One nevers know where the path of an artist will take them unless they follow the dots.

Murals abound around the town.

Corn angel.

We poked around the town in the morning, took care of chores, and met some locals.

Note for futurethe visitors: There is an AWESOME food co-op on Bullard Street! If we’d known about it beforehand, we wouldn’t have mailed ourselves food.

Everyone we’ve met in Silver City has been incredibly kind. The town has a great vibe. Like Lee Vining, Twisp, Flagstaff, Escalante, or Shasta City it beckons me to stay awhile.

The biggest highlight of the day for me had to be finding a new pair of shoes! I was really fortunate to find a pair of Asics at one of the sporting goods shops a couple of blocks from our hotel. Bonus, they were very, very,  VERY on sale. I’m especially pleased about the shoes as I bought the same model about 6 months ago in anticipation of running the Columbia River Gorge marathon. I then promptly lost one of the shoes after only one run, when it fell out of my bag on my walk to work. Hopefully this pair of Asics will help me walk many days of marathon-distance miles on the trail.

Thanks for the first 144 miles! I'm happy to have found a pair of Asics in the model I wore for 15 years and ~2,000 miles of the PCT. (If only Asics hadn't changed it's models in 2014.)