not quite the only one
Posted by Zonie on February 23, 2020 at 04:11:17
In the early morning it was raining and 55°F. With my winter metabolism, I figured I wouldn't need a coat (and at times I was actually perspiring from my exertion). I had overalls I hadn't worn before this week and needed to break in. They were blue denim button fly Roundhouse brand. I wore my tan snap-button shirt--if it hadn't been tan, it would have become that color anyway. I wore a camouflage ball cap to keep the rain out of my face. On my feet I had some old socks, work boots, and the gaiters I bought last winter. The gaiters were quite useful. I hadn't expected to keep my feet dry (and they didn't), but they kept the rocks, twigs, and thorns out of my boots. The rain kept coming down until mid-afternoon. We got about an inch.
This Saturday I had no cable appointment, so I didn't hold back. I got thoroughly soaked and plastered with mud. With the cooler conditions, I didn't have as much worry about drinking water as last weekend. I didn't quite go through my canteen the whole six hours I was out there.
What really astonished me was that when I got to the Tatum Boulevard Reach 11 trailhead at 10:30 there were three other vehicles parked there. It seems I wasn't the only one who liked it wet. Shortly after I set out I met one of them.
He was wearing a hoodie, shorts and sandals and was listening to headphones. When he saw me, he removed his headphones and said to me in a Yankee (New England) accent, "Looks like we have different ways of going through the water." He probably stayed on the trail. I knew sandals probably wouldn't work well in the deep mud.
I've noticed that people who move here often find that they miss weather they once thought was bad, and perhaps that was the case with him. I'm reminded of a time I was working on a construction crew, and a young man who had moved here from Minnesota in early January started noticing something was wrong in late February. He said, "There's something wrong with this place. This is a bright, sunny day, and there have been a lot of them."
I had said, "This is a desert. You didn't expect a blizzard every week like back home, did you?"
I decided to do the cardiovascular workout first and cover a lot of ground before doing serious wallowing. I had, as the song goes, a boot stomp in my walk, as with the rain coming down, the heavy clay trail was yielding mud with almost every step, quite a pleasant sensation. I did stop to do a couple service projects, kicking mud to drain puddles on the trail.
After lots of stomping in trail mud and splashing through puddles, eventually I came to one of the construction areas that had the deep puddle for which I had built a drainage last weekend. The drainage was working, but as I waded in and approached the puddle's outlet, I found the mud was knee deep and my feet got stuck. I sat down on a muddy bank, getting the seat of my overalls muddy, paused to get a drink from my canteen, and contemplated this as my opportunity to get plastered. I reached into the mud and helped water from the top of the puddle into it, leaned back and got my left foot horizontal and then my right foot. I then turned on my right side and on my belly, rising to upright. I deliberately smeared some of the sticky clay mud on my chest and shirt sleeves. I then slogged around for a while in the deep mud and headed back towards another construction mud pit.
The next pit was very uneven, so I would step from ankle deep and slip way into thigh deep. I didn't quite get stuck, but it took a lot of strength to get out, especially stepping up from thigh deep to ankle deep mud. Not having learned my lesson, I turned around and went back in again. This time, I army crawled out of the deep mud onto some shallower mud, turned around and slid back into the deep mud on my backside. I kept going back and forth. This mud hole seemed almost addicting.
Eventually I pried myself away with the thought of playing connect-the-puddles in the torn up area near the equestrian center, so I slogged back along the trail towards that area.
There had been so much rain that the puddles I first encountered were deep and not very muddy. Going through them was actually getting me clean. That wouldn't do, so I went to another area and found a deep puddle in a trail I hadn't covered and tried to make a drainage to the sandy area of the arroyo adjacent to it. It was only a few paces away, but I sank into the mud berm knee deep and was stuck. I had to do some more mud maneuvers to get out of there and finally make a channel in the mud to drain the puddle. I repeated it for the other side of the puddle with similar results--in each case the berm was deep, thick sticky mud.
I headed to another trail puddle by piles of mud and churned up more mud and sat and slid in it for a while. By this point the rain had ended and I could feel the warm sunshine on my muddy clothes. I wasn't really chilled, but the sun did feel good after all that rain and mud.
I wasn't terribly energetic anymore, so I slogged back towards the trailhead, stopping to churn mud on the way but not wallowing anymore. Between the sun, the wind and my body heat, the heavy clay mud was drying and flaking off my overalls, and by the time I got back to my car I wasn't extremely dirty anymore. I encountered a couple walking their dogs as I neared the parking lot, but they seemed to take no notice of me. Since the encounter in the morning, I hadn't seen anyone else.
When I got home I found that hosing down the gaiters didn't take long, and laundry pre-wash of the shirt and overalls didn't take long either. It was quite a satisfying day. It's been a long time since I had this much fun on a hike.
- Re: not quite the only one Pamudder 03:22:19 3/01/2020
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