The Continental Divide: Getting To The Border

Leaving home when key elements in your life are perfect is pretty tough. But to have so many wonderous humans cheering us along made it all the easier. Except leaving my cat. Though he’s not actually a perfect element in my life, he’s a little shit.

I chose to watch ‘Arctic’ on the plane, which is about a man who is battling survival after his plane crashes in the Arctic. Needless to say I finished the film cold, worried about bear encounters and really not wanting to be on a plane.

I make clever life choices.

A mere 24hrs after departure we made it to Tucson Arizona. Tucson is one of two closer airports to the start of the CDT. The other is Albuquerque, but were there cool songs made about Albuquerque?

Shelley immediately fell in love with all cacti she saw, and has special plans for developing the relationship further, creatively, of course.

Lordsburg is the town closest to the southern terminus (the start), today’s mission was to get there. But, not before the best burrito of my life in the Welcome Diner next to the bus station.

Life is good and so far this hike is easy.

Greyhound (the bus company) had decided to change the departure time of our pre-booked bus from Tucson Lordsburg by an hour, leaving earlier. They thought it would be a fun game to wait and see if we would find out accidentally, rather than let us know beforehand. Which, luckily we did. Ha! We win Greyhound.

We received an incredibly warm welcome at the Econolodge and proceeded to ready ourselves for the surprisingly overwhelming job of resupplying (with food) and sending our first two mail boxes of food up the trail.

We then rewarded ourselves with beer and snacks.

Dinner was my second burrito. I pondered that a lot of Mexican food looks like vomit and everything has green chilli on it. Which is totally fine with me, but not so fine for Shelley.

It was good to spend some time here properly readying ourselves for the journey ahead. 85 miles from the Mexican border, back to Lordsburg.

I found a particularly dashing outfit in the hiker box (the box where hikers leave their unwanted goods in the hope it will bring much joy to fellow hikers who forgot or need said items left) so as to not get my sexy trail clothes dirty until I absolutely had to (about a minute after I first put them on).

Many hikers were coming in to Econo, broken, and limping having competed the first 5 days of the CDT. They were kind enough to share valuable wisdom; like how many snakes almost bit them, how many times they lost the trail, how everything wants to kill you, and how many miles they walked in the wrong direction, and what a ‘desolate pack of crap’ the first section was.

Cool, I’m excited.

Our host at the Ecolodge described CDT hikers as a special kind of crazy and told us about one woman who arrived here from the border two days later than she’d intended to and got straight on a bus home.

With food mailed ahead, postcards sent home, snow gear sent on to snowy Colorado and our packs stocked up with (probably) too much food, we were collected from Lordsburg by Dion who drove us to the desolate ex-railway town of Hatchia (slightly closer to the Mexican border).

In exchange for a mere $100 he drives us to our free night’s accommodation, feeds us dinner, drives us to the border the next day and caches 10 gallons of water in 5 separate locations between the start and Lordsburg. We’d definitely die without this.

Joined by two other hikers: ‘Flip Flop’ and ‘Hurro’, we traveled to our accommodation, in Hachita, a community of 26 in a town rather reminiscent of something out of Deliverance, minus the squealing. Deliverance is one of my favourite films, so I was content.

We stayed in the community centre, it was all very cool. We drank beer, watched the sun set, shared stories and ate salad, the thing I crave most whole on trail. A perfect pre-trail evening and a great way to get excited before a future of certain hardship and misery.

Dion woke us to Paul Simon (can anyone guess which apt song he chose)? It was 2 hours from the border from here on lumpy dirt roads.

The southern terminus on the Mexico/US border is named Crazy Cook, because, while building the fence border, Frank, a labourer mouthed off to the cook, who, in return, axed him dead. There is a monument and a grave at the border, cheery stuff.

After necessary border pictures, we hiked on, into an arid wasteland walking on what only can be described as a snake highway.

Cheerio!