Mileage: 34.5 miles (1516.3-1550.8)
I woke up first around 5:00am but couldn't bear to leave the comfort of the king size bed. It wasn't until close to 6:45 that my back starting hurting, which finally got me out of bed.
I went to the lobby and grabbed some coffee after I packed up my things. I sat there eating cookies and drinking the weak brown stuff for close to an hour talking to the front desk guy. He asked me the normal stuff about hiking and I answered politely. I was off by about 7:30am and made a quick stop at the gas station for two breakfast sandwiches before I left town on the highway.
I also had some leftover pizza and breadsticks in my bag from the night before which I munched on throughout the day. The landscape was wide open once I got off the highway, with the rolling divide a mile or two to my West. I passed a rock quarry and followed old jeep roads, many of which were barely distinguishable from the rest of the desert.
There were a few cacti, but not nearly as many as I saw down in New Mexico - they were all small as well, barely a few inches off the ground. I still was wary of them as their spines would still really hurt if you got one in your foot. It was mostly flat, with gentle ups and downs here and there, but nothing sustained. The steepest parts were if I got off trail and had to go up and down an arroyo.
I saw a few creatures that resembled small horny toads - too long to be a toad, but too fat to be a true lizard. I'm not sure what they are, but I'll have to look them up. One thing I won't have to lookup is the rattlesnake that warned me from a bush I nearly stepped on. I learned firsthand (and on Radiolab) today that hearing actually elicits a faster reaction than any other sense, taking only nanoseconds for a sound to go from our ear to our spinal cord (just a few neurons are involved!) I was thankful for this as I jumped back instinctively when I heard the rattle. It wasn't until at least a second or two later that my brain actually registered that the sound was a deadly poisonous snake. There's evolution for ya ... not only on our end, but the snake as well! Rattlers had evolved the best warning system they could in terms of reaction time, as the last thing they want to do is bite you (it wastes valuable energy since they aren't going to eat us...)
It was probably a Western Prairie Rattler, though I didn't stick my head in the sagebrush to give him a full examination. I moved on, being more vigilant as I walked until I hit the first water source of the day, a solar spring. I took a break, grabbed some water, and set out again for the next 16 mile stretch without water.
I walked along the highway once more for about a mile, until the trail diverged to follow a pipeline for five miles and then a road. I never saw the pipeline, so I figured it must be underground. It's funny the map would say, "follow the pipeline" if it was underground, but that was the situation. I came to one more paved road, crossed quickly and was back on dirt roads the rest of the day.
I got to Bull Spring around 6pm and once again filled my bottles. There was great, clean flow directly from a pipe so didn't even need to filter it. I pressed on after a snack and got about five miles past Bull before setting up camp while the sun went down around 8:45pm. I made my ramen, wrote a bit and turned in for the night by 10pm. Lightning flashed in the distance and the coyotes howled. I hoped neither got too close.
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