Day 5: Negligible senescence

I wake up around 5, cold and wrapped in sleeping bad, liner, and a hat. My bladder finally pushes me out of the tent at 5:30, and I make breakfast and watch the cows while Granite does. I drink coffee instead of chai, opting for the less sweet option. I'm just less interested in sweet things—which is too bad because I packed a lot of chocolate on this trip.

After breakfast, I crawl back into the tent to read and doze while Granite cooks for himself. Then he returns and wraps me up in his arms for a while, which is so warm.

When I asked Steve about hammock camping, he said that he and his wife didn't like it as a couple. Sharing a tent "is intimate. It's not necessarily romantic, but it's intimate," he said. Hammock camping isn't.

Sharing a tent is intimate. I'm confronted with my body odor, the dirt on Granite's toes, my incessant allergies, the way he hangs his socks to dry, how he shifts in his sleep. I see and know everything he does in the tent, and he sees and knows everything I do.

I'm a bit headachy in the morning but I set off past the thin babbling river and down the meadow. We have a 5.5 mile walk along the meadow, and it's an easy slope that gains 1,000 feet. I insist that it's downhill and Granite breaks out the detailed topo maps he loves to reference. It's clearly uphill but we agree to call it downhill for morale.

The meadow is wide and wild, thick bushes strewn with flowers clumping along the ides of the trail, and the tree-carpeted slopes around us making us feel like we're in a huge shallow bowl. The sky is right with occassional cottony clouds, and a soft, steady breeze keeps the bugs at bay.

We follow a small herd of cattle that amble ahead of us, breaking into anxious trots when we get close. They walk a few miles of the trail, which is both funny and annoying, and we imagine what they might be thinking and joke about their intentions of getting to Durango.

We finally reach the end of the meadow and discover tons of cows.We chide them to move them away from the swinging metal gate, and then step through and lock the gate behind us. The next two miles are a breeze, downhill for real and shaded. We end section 4 and refill our water and enter section 5.

I'm happy to soak my feet a bit, though they hurt less today. It's also a relief to have clear water again.

Section 5 is full of trees. Granite points out a bristlecone pine—which he says have 'negligible senescence," meaning they don't show signs of aging. Alligators have the same thing going.

The walking is fine and simple, though I resent my heavy backpack. Why are we carrying 5 days of food when we are sure to be in Breckenridge in 4?

All afternoon, rain threatens. Huge dark clouds gather ahead of us and behind us, and thunder echoes from different directions. And yet it doesn't hit us. It spatters a few times and we don pack covers and even rain jackets briefly, but then it fades.

We arrive at camp early, around 3:30 PM, and set up the tent. The thunder continues and it starts to spatter again just as we finish getting the tent erected and the rainfly taut.

I throw our packs inside and we slip in, zipping the tent behind us. It starts raining in earnest and we are so lucky to have avoided it. It rain on and off for the rest of the afternoon, gentle patter on the tent. We read and lounge and chat and sneak out during brief rain breaks to cook and clean up a bit before returning to our warm dry home.