Welcome to the Wilderness

We awoke Sunday morning refreshed and ready for our first backpacking adventure of the trip.  Fortunately, we’d gotten within an hour of the Gila Cliff Dwellings and right outside the boundaries of the accompanying 3.3M acres of the Gila National Forest.  Liz wanted some coffee so we stopped in at a tradin’ post and ran into our new best friend, Doug.

Doug: What brings you in here this morning?
Chris: We’re heading to the Gila National Forest, do you know anything about it?
Doug: First off, you’re in New Mexico now and it’s pronounced HEE-la with a Spanish G.

Doug proceeded to spend 25 minutes making hand-drawn maps with a blunt-tipped blue colored pencil.  He was a wee bit high strung but gave us some good tips about what trails to take and how to get to the hot springs (you’ll know when you run into the “interesting” people, or the “naked hippies” as our friend at the backpacking store put it).

Doug's hand-drawn trail map

Doug then gave us some (slightly stale) coffee and we showed our appreciation by buying some powdered donettes before we headed on our way.

We checked out the Cliff Dwellings and Liz broke out her fancy medium-format camera for the first time on the trip.

Liz the photographer

The cliff dwellings

We had a quick canned bean lunch and then headed to TJ Corral to get our gear together.  The first day was 4 1/4 miles of hiking to the camp.  It was a beautiful hike through Little Bear Canyon and we arrived at the river campsite in the early evening.  As usual, we were very tired after our long day and, despite all attempts to stay up, crashed at 9pm.  We woke up early and started the hike up to the hot springs, 2 miles and 15 river crossings each way.

Crossing the Gila river for the umpteenth time

The hot springs was a welcome semi-bath, until a big black spider joined the party and prompted a quick exit, just in time for a trail mix and granola bar lunch.

The pool at the hot springs

We trapsed the 2 miles back to the campsite and spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and trying to pretend we weren’t as tired and hungry as we felt.  We had planned to take the 6-mile trail with 50 river crossings back to the car the next morning, but since Liz had some foot trouble we decided to just return via the shorter, dry route we’d arrived by.

After packing up, we headed off for our next destination, the Grand Canyon.  We were going to stay the night in Sedona but ended up going straight on to Flagstaff due to time and budgetary concerns.  Stay tuned for more updates, coming soon …