Day 42 – 4/24/16
14.2 map / 16.4 GPS miles
655.8 / 701.1 miles total

After breakfast at the Inn, we got on our way. We got picked up by Aly and Alex, two young women returning home from a visit to Zion. They actually turned their car around and came back for us because they said we looked so cute all 3 of us standing their with our thumbs out. They had never picked up hitchhikers before! We had a blast riding with them and hope the experience was just as fun for them!

Back to our route, we were on dirt road all day, climbing up to the Kaibab Plateau.

Along the way we found a water tank and Bubs crawled up to investigate, though we had plenty of water from town. After the tank the road curved sharply east. Hmm, that didn’t seem right. I checked the GPS. D’oh! We missed a turn 3/4 of a mile back. Upon closer examination of the map, we found we hadn’t missed a road turn, we were just supposed to cross country a short distance to cut off a big out of the way loop in the road. Our normal maps differentiate between road/trail and cross country with a solid or dashed line, respectively. Except these aren’t our normal maps, I made these and just plopped the GPS track from someone else onto some topo maps and called it good. Oops. Lesson learned with a ~1.5 mile penalty.

We finished out the day at the junction where our alternate meets back up with the official Hayduke (and AZT). The elevation here is ~8500′ and the weather has shifted once again. It’s really cold and forecast to continue to be cold with maybe some precipitation thrown in. Eww. Grand Canyon here we come!