The Hike: Part 2 - On The Trail

We climbed out of bed at 6 AM. The night before we decided that due to the short days, we would maximize available light. We purchased some yogurt, juice for breakfast. The restaurant opens at 7 AM and that would not fit our plan. A loaf of bread, a package of sliced cheese, and an Oscar Mayer turkey lunch meat assortment pack allowed us to make 4 sandwiches for the hike. If you haven’t tried the Oscar Mayer turkey lunch meat assortment pack, you are not missing too much. There are 4 versions, turkey, bologna, salami, and ham, all packed in the same vacuum sealed pack. In a blind taste test, I’m convinced I could not distinguish one from the other, but I digress. We filled 4 liter bottles with water, and loaded them into Randeen’s backpack. Along with binoculars and a few other small items this brought her pack to about 15 pounds. I shed some weight from my camera backpack leaving 3 lenses, camera body, an extra battery, some memory cards, shutter release, tripod (2 lbs 15 oz), and for some reason a camping headlight. My bag weighed in at around 25 to 30 pounds.

We were on the road by 6:30; we had about 35 miles to travel by car to the trail head. It was still dark with no light in the sky. Shortly after 7:00, we saw some trace of light in the eastern sky. After a few wrong turns, we made it to the parking area for the trail; there were no other cars in sight. We pulled on our packs and extended our hiking sticks. We were on the trail at 8:10 , knowing that we had started before sunrise.

The first part of the Marufo Vega Trail was under our feet. This would take us through the Dead Horse Mountains to the rim of Boquillas Canyon and, we were told, an exceptional view of the Rio Grande River. We hiked up the wash for about a mile, then turned up a hilly limestone path and over a ridge. We came to a spot that the National Park map declared to be a short and strenuous climb.

The thing that I realized is that the park service was right about the strenuous, but we might differ on the definition of short. We finally came to the split in the trail, roughly the 4 mile mark. We sat down an discovered that it was noon. We were falling behind.

We pushed on and found the terrain to be increasingly challenging. There were many places where we were on our butts trying to keep from falling off the ridges.

We continued to push on even though we were taking more time than I expected.

We saw some wild burros, but we still did not find any view of the Rio Grande. It was approaching 2 PM and we had not reached the half way point.

We pushed on and reached the Rio Grande. At this point the view was secondary. Our main thoughts were on getting back to tour truck before dark. I was not certain that all was well.