Left Silver City on a road walk. I continue to not be a fan of road
walking. Sure, sometimes it’s nice to have easy going miles on a
quite, unused jeep road. You can walk side by side. You can switch
sides when to walk on smoother tread. You can shut your mind off and
just walk. But highway walking? That sucks. We did a bunch of it. Ten
miles? Then turned off to the right on a good quality dirt road for
another bunch of miles. It was the start of our own adventure.

No other southbounders (and I bet, few northbounders) hiked the way we
hiked. That’s a little strange because the only radical thing that we
did was to stay on the official trail. We hiked the “Red Route”. No
one else did. Turned off the highway, onto that dirt road, at a huge
mine site. Kind of cool seeing the oversized earth moving equipment
moving around the site looking like tiny toys.

Camped that night up at Mud Spring, in a mountain range that I’ve
already forgotten the name of. Besides having to drink directly from a
cattle trough that had no inflow, it wasn’t a bad site. Then, a little
after midnight, calamity struck. Lost and I bolted upright with a
sizeable FIRE burning right next to us. FIRE! Holy hell! Within a half
a second of waking up, it grabbed Lost’s burning pack to pull it
farther to safety. Regretably, I hadn’t seen that her pack was already
aflames. The FIRE! panic switched to pain and greater fear. I burned
my hand! Water! Sure enough, grabbing a burning pack isn’t a good
idea. I now had melted plastic all over my hand. SHIT. I could prolong
the writing of this, simply because I’m a fan of myself. And being
badly burned is an important event in my eyes…. But… Well… I
peeled off all the plastic. It was mostly superficial. I had partial
thickness burns on two of my fingers, and a number of burn blisters.
It took a vicodin and some time to ease the pain enough to go to sleep
again. Lost, lost a lot of important and expensive stuff in the fire.
The entire bottom of her pack burned, as did her iPod, camera, cell
phone, some food, and various odds and ends. Not good at all.
Remarkably, she fashioned a fix for her pack and we could continue the
thruhike without interuption. We guess that she’d lit some duff on
fire hours before while cooking. It smoldered for hours, then burst
into flames when the wind picked up later in the night.

That’s definitely the big story of the section. On other topics? The
mountain range with Jack’s Peak was small, but quite nice. It was
novel hiking trail that was mostly well built and always well signed.
It was novel hiking trail that had seen no footprints for months. We
left the mountains and did some desert walking. We drank out of
another cattle trough. Two in a row. That one had a solar well near
by, but those don’t work when you’re there only in the dark hours. We
learned to hate grass seeds. More bothersome than cactus spines, these
tiny grass seeds would go right through our shoes, into our socks and
into our feet. Their needly quality called for immediate stopping. It
was so sharp and painful that we had to remove them instantly. It was
at it’s worst just north of Lordsburg, but continued for dozens of
miles south of there as well.