Day 8 – 3/21/16
14.5 map / 18.9 GPS miles
130.3 / 134.7 total

Oh where to even begin. Today felt like an entire week went by.

There was better trail along Salt Creek this morning, but we were slow moving because of the many stops to see archeological sites, including the All American Man pictograph which I’ve long wanted to see.

Then we stopped at a little granary Mike tipped us off to. The granary was apparently abandoned with seed still stored in it and squash still grow there today! Being March of course nothing was growing, but there were a bunch of baseball sized squash from last year on the ground and the shriveled vines they grew on. It was really cool!!

We took lunch at a nice watering hole toward the end of Salt Creek and stocked up on water – it’s very hard to say when our next water source will be – maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow, maybe not?? Anyway, this morning I put on my gross wet socks from yesterday since I figured it would be more of the same sloshing in and out of creek and sand. But the trail today was so good that at lunch I put on my cleanish dry socks. Naturally 5 minutes after lunch we were wading through a swamp.

Leaving Salt Creek, we headed up a sandy wash and the going was slow. We had several dry falls to find ways around. There was supposedly old trail there somewhere, but we could never find it. The route got harder and harder. We did some sketchy climbs and even hauled packs up with a rope at one spot. We finally joined up with an ATV road for the last mile and a half.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is a 47% chance of snow and the route we are on is almost all cross country with notes like “choose path of least resistance to top of cliffs” and “slow going through small ledges”, not to mention the lack of water. Looking at our maps we see a way to connect an ATV road to another alternate that is slightly longer in miles, but we think will be significantly faster and safer for the forecasted snow.