this time I remembered my camp shovel
Posted by Zonie on January 07, 2023 at 22:37:35
At work Teresa the receptionist asked me how my vacation went. I told her I had too much fun. She said there was no such thing. I said, "As much as I enjoy hiking in thunderstorms, splashing through mud puddles, busting through palo verde and mesquite thickets and sliding down muddy slopes, I know that at my age there's a limit to how much of that my body can take. I need the relatively sedate duties of a furnace operator before I'm ready for any more vacation."
Kimberly, our quality manager, is a retired barrel racer, so I relayed the strange incident last Saturday and asked if she would be confident riding her horse at a full gallop at the Reach 11 Recreation Area. She said she would not be and rides only at a walk there. Unlike me she is not a fan of the heavy clay mud of the trails there. I suppose she has to clean it from under horseshoes.
Julio admitted he completely forgot to make an appointment to have his chest pains investigated. Well they haven't returned, and he worked quite well this week. He commented about the uncharacteristically cloudy weather we've been having. I told him the latest term for it was "atmospheric river" but that when we were young it was called the "pineapple express." Humid tropical air from the vicinity of Hawaii is advected to the American Southwest where it causes cloudy and rainy weather. Right now the "river" is aimed at northern California, and our next chance of rain is expected to be Tuesday evening.
Today was bright and sunny, and I returned to Reach 11. This time I remembered to put my camp shovel in my knapsack. I figured it would be more efficient for trail maintenance than my boot heels. I tried to take all the trails in the area to see if any repairs needed to be made.
I was impressed by how much the thirsty ground had absorbed all that rain. There was very little standing water in the mesquite thickets, but there was a lot of green grass growing there.
I didn't have much to do improving drainage. Most of the mud holes had already drained. I finally went to the south trail and tried to find the treacherous hole to find out how my repairs had done. It was hard to judge where it was. Water levels had fluctuated. We had a lot of rain Sunday and a little rain Tuesday night, and since then things were sinking in and drying out.
I figured the only thing to do was to stomp in every part of every mud puddle to find out if any were unduly yielding. I had a lot of fun that way but never did find the exact spot I had repaired. I guess my repair must have worked. I was often interrupted, because it was a bright sunny day and many mountain bicyclists were using the trail. Unfortunately they all rode around the mud puddles instead of through them. Despite the mild January sunshine and temperatures only in the mid 60s, I was going through a lot of the water in my canteen. I guess last Sunday's rain hike really increased my metabolism.