One week on the trail!

Greetings from Silver City, New Mexico! We made it into town this morning and are taking a break for the day.  Wow, we have been on the trail for a week already and what a week it has been!

Ready to hike north! (At the border)

We spent the first five days in the very hot and dry desert- what a place to hike through.  Here, the trail switches between sandy/gravel road, and traveling cross country, where there is no trail and we area walking from one trail marker to the next, making our own path. One surprising thing is that there are trail markers, something I was not expecting. Sometimes they are very far apart and you cannot see from one to the next, but they are there if you look.  Traveling cross country means LOTS and lots of thorns and prickers. I truly think that over 95% of every plant we saw in the desert has some type of sharp thorns growing from it, ready to stick into our shoes, socks or pants.

The desert

 None the less, the desert is beautiful. It is so open, we can look back for days and see where we have come.  We've had beautiful blue skies every day, but with that, very little shade.  We hike all day with long sleeves and hats and bandanas to protect ourselves from the sun but are still not able to completely avoid it.
  One thing we have had to be very careful about is water.  We have not seen a single natural water source yet, so in the beginning we had to rely on water caches (water that trail angels leave for us at road crossings). After that, we were on our own to get water from the only other source available- water tanks used for the cattle. We've gotten very good at getting water from these sources, and the water has been surprisingly good so far, but we still treat it just to be safe. Here are some of the more interesting water sources we have found:

  On Sunday afternoon the landscape changed and we finally headed up into the mountains of the Gila National Forest.  We were finally hiking among trees!! There has been an abundance of shade, fewer cattle and a wonderful breeze. Yesterday we were up at over 8,000 feet and had beautiful views all around. This picture, taken Sunday afternoon was a wonderful change of scenery from the flat, hot, open desert.

  We have seen some very interesting wildlife so far; lots of snakes (mostly rattlers), lizards, jack rabbits, deer, a wild boar and yesterday morning as we started hiking, we saw bear tracks in the sand. Bears in New Mexico??! So I looked it up online and read that in fact the Gila National forest does have black bear! Who would have thought!
   One thing I was a bit unsure of when we left was navigation. I had heard the trail was not well marked and it was very easy to get lost. So far, I have not found that to be true. There have been lots of markers and when we started into the Gila National Forest two days ago, for the first time we were following a well worn path!  We still have our maps and GPS which have proven extremely helpful many times.
  I have very limited time on a library computer at the moment, but we will keep you posted on our progress. Thank you for reading and happy hiking!
-Jetpack