Day 24: junction of 193 & 501 to Ojo del Dado, ~26 miles, ~442 miles total
Back home, a good weather weekend often means a flurry of emails go out about organizing a trip for the upcoming dates; sometimes a trip gets moved to/or planned for a Friday.
Today included a tall peak that could tempt our friends back home based on prominence. But they may not have wanted the rest of the day, post-summit. Our Cascades endeavors often entail bushwacking, brush bashing, 3rd and 4th class conditions, summit stays of 15 minutes, the day ending with a road walk back to the cars by headlamp. Equating to great trips. But somehow I don’t think we could have convinced them that summiting a 11,301 foot extinct volcano would be as fun. Maybe.
Hike on Friday, 5/16
Climb up 11,301′ Mt. Taylor via dirt trail. See patches of snow and views to Albuquerque, Arizona, and Colorado. Enjoy breakfast on the summit.
Lovely aspen grove on the way up Taylor.
First snow sighting!
Marmot, Mukmuk and some guy who always hangs out up on Taylor.
Gabriel enjoys breakfast at 11,301 feet.
Descend trail for a mile. Then gently descend on dirt forest roads for another 23 miles of road.
Nice country around 10,000 feet.
A spruce cone that Gabriel particularly liked near American Spring.
Stop at one good clean spring for water (American Spring). Observe the somewhat feral horse wandering around the trough and broken fence. Get some water. Hike on to a tank with okay water. Pick up a liter each. Wrongly assume that you can get better water a few miles later (darn the water report becoming out of date in a few days time). Hike to the next tank and find it dry.
Nice forest and CD trail! We didn't know we were starting a 13+ mile dry stretch.
Antelope Tank. Damp if not dry. This makes the afternoon a different hike.
Hike on, uncertain whether it’ll take 9 miles or 18 miles to get to the next water. Know that you have less than two liters of water as you enter the warmer grasslands and woodlands of Antelope Flats. Keep hiking steadily, not knowing which of the next three sources will have water.
Antelope Flats country. Beautiful and dry.
Grab two liters of silty, smelly, poor excuse for water from a trodden, shallow cattle tank. Hope you don’t have to drink it. Hike on three plus miles.
Ranger Tank. Our emergency backup "water".
7:30 reach Ojo del Dado. A small gorge with clearish water no longer fenced off from cattle. Feel grateful. Descend what should be a fun rock scramble, but less so on tired feet to water. Get shoes covered in cow poo water. Stumble out of gorge. Camp after dusk. Filter water.
Ojo del Dado is somewhere ahead of us.
Ojo del Dado
Filtering the brown green water before we devised a more efficient strategy.
Gross cow poo mud on my shoe. I tried to stem out on the same rocks Gabriel used to get to the less murky water. Alas my legs are not as long as his. Grossness thus ensued.
Contemplate the modern convenience that most people in the United States can regularly walk less than 100 feet to a faucet from which potable water flows. Do not take this for granted.
Finish dinner. Hydrated. Fed. About to rest. Feel grateful that the CDT isn’t too tamed yet.
marmot's adventures 
Wonderful blog Marmot! Don’t forget to smell the flowers!
Botany Boy
Thanks Botany Boy!
On this day I did stop after we got water at American Spring to watch a metallic emerald green hummingbird fly and flit about some currants that were just starting a flower amid a small grove of aspen. It was lovely to see one of the little hummers that buzz about us so often.
The wild flowers are becoming more abundant to enjoy.
D’oh! Sorry the water report led you astray, but I know you can appreciate it’s all just part of the experience.
No worries! The fact that there is even a water report is amazing and no one should expect it to be 100% accurate. In deed a dry stretch or many is all part of the CDT. It’s good to keep a little of the old CDT brutality around. A hundred thank yous, fuzzy bunnies, a fine baked goods to you and Lovenote!