We fall asleep to thick rain, pounding on the shelter walls. Every few hours I wake up to drops still pattering down, and I am surprised.

I sleep anxiously, half nervous that the rain will come in. When Carrot wakes me at 5:20, I am groggy, but we’ve decided that it’s extra mega good luck to hike before 7, and that encourages me. We really do have the best hiking days when we get an early start.

We do the morning things with sprinkles falling on thick forest mud. My bathroom situation is regular, which thrills me, as I’ve mentioned. We’re starting with a descent, and I’m bundled up against the wet and the rain.

Carrot takes off first, quietly padding through the thick grey. I climb down rocky dirt paths, my shoes growing thick heavy heels with accumulated mud. Every hundred yard or so I pound them on rocks, releasing giant clumps of damp earth. It’s oddly satisfying, this dirt catch and release. Dirt heels are a problem I can fix.

In the distance, I see Carrot roll her ankle and limp a bit. I yell to ask if she’s okay, but she doesn’t hear me and keeps going.

I think maybe I am going too slow, the mud makes me pokey. I pick up my footsteps, half jogging down the trail in my layers as the clouds part and the sun comes out. I drip sweat, rip my knit hat off of my head and carry it. The rest of my layers will have to wait, I’m trying to get down the hill and they take too much time to take off.

I reach the river I am to ford, and tear off my layers before cramming a bar into my mouth. It’s a constant fight on trail, balancing listening to your body, attending to your needs and making time.

I fill up my water bottles, and speculate the best way to get across this river. There’s no clear path up and out of the red rock, no obvious trail on the other side, no particularly shallow section to get from here to there either. Lately on trail I’ve realized that my avoidance of inevitabilities really adds to my discomfort. At the bank of the river, I make a decision. I won’t resist getting wet. I won’t resist the rocks on trail. I won’t resist the cross country navigation up steep ridges. I want a mindset that doesn’t put so much of the onus on circumstance or on Carrot and her expertise. I want to toughen up.

And with that, I ford the river. From my new perspective on the other side of the bank, I still don’t see an obvious trail, but I don’t resist it. There’s no obvious trail! That’s regular on this route, probably a lot of routes! I scan for the safest path to scramble up the boulders, and with hands and feet, I climb. What I’m doing seems to make little sense, and suddenly the rocks part and there it is: a set of switchbacks.

I cry a lot today. I am confused about the state of my life, what makes the most sense, the best way to have my strongest sense of self. I eat chocolate and it tastes fucking incredible. I look at my period app, and it turns out I have PMS.

Oh. Right.

—

📍The Mogollon Rim trail is on Yavapai, Western Apache, Hopi and Hohokum land. I am a grateful guest.

We set our bedrolls out to cowboy camp a few hundred feet above our tenaja, but mosquitos plague Carrot, zinging at her ears and biting at her face while I gently snooze beside her. Carrot wakes me to set up our shelter in the dark, and I am useless and dopey in my half asleep slumber. Eventually, we settle back in.

I toss and turn through my final hour of sleep, and I wake up grumpy. Everything is fine, there’s nothing wrong at all really, and still I am a dark hole of grumpiness.

I caffeinate. I eat my oatmeal, adding in freeze dried blueberries to cheer myself and it works, a little. I tell jokes with Carrot, who is not grumpy per se, but definitely more tired than usual too. We look at our water notes and see today will be long carries or stock ponds exclusively and I try not to let it get to me. Water is water is water right?! We’re in the dang desert.

Finally, we are packed and ready to go. Our bags remain heavy, but less heavy then yesterday and we decide to meet at another tenaja just seven miles away for lunch.

Today, our terrain is rocky and our trail indistinct. There are so many ways to be a rock, it turns out! Some rocks are more pleasant then others (I’m a fan of big uniform smoothy bois. They’re easy for stepping!) but today’s rocks are solidly middle of the road. They’re jabby, but they don’t wrench my ankles. They’re everywhere, but don’t quite make the terrain overly punishing by forcing you into cat’s claw or prickly pear. Today’s rocks are medium fine and that’s good enough for me.

Still, I am slow. I go 1.5 miles in 1.5 hours, in fact and when I find Carrot under a tree we agree that we’re going to need to pick up the pace to like, get anywhere. But how does one hike faster then they can hike? Therein lies the question, dear reader.

Luckily, we’re all descents today and the trail becomes more obvious, perfectly clear and 12 inches wide. Cairns dot the way. It gets warmer as we go lower and I am sweating. I feel hot spots on my feet, but we’re so close to lunch I decide to wait. Just around the bend I find Carrot tucked away above two beautiful tinajas (minimal mosquito larvae!) filling up her bottles.

We set a timer for 45 minutes and take off our shoes to air our feet and tape hot spots. We purify our water, a slightly yellow earth broth with just a few bugs. We drink electrolyte powder and eat caffeinated jelly beans and eventually the alarm goes off and we pack up.

We are about to start a climb, one with an awkward connector to our next stretch of trail, according to the creators of the MRT. we speculate what awkward could mean. You climb while farting in front of your crush? You climb while getting caught pants down and wiping your ass by a day hiker? You climb with, like, really bad breath just before a first kiss?

It’s hard to say.

The tread is mercifully flat, elevation wise, but lumpy under the feet– like the cows made a conceptual art project with their hooves and red mud, just after an intense flash of rain. We walk toward the gate that is the threshold to our climb, we’re chatting merrily about foods we have eaten and foods we will eat in the future, and my left ankle rolls out beneath me, sliding sideways into a loud pop.

I yelp and fall to the trail. Carrot is with me on the ground, asks me what I need and I’m crying but I say I need nothing, that we should keep walking. I move forward, unsure of the l extent of the damage, and when the tread turns to rocks again, I tear up. My ankle hurts. I could keep going, but it’s not a good idea.

“It’s nice out, we should go swimming anyway” Carrot says.

We backtrack to a drainage that has become a blessed roaring river and strip off our clothes. I ice my ankle in the river. We wash our chafe and we google our options on sun dappled shore.

Turns out, we’re 2.5 miles from the Village of Oak Creek, and they have a Chinese restaurant. We are suddenly so hungry that we’re faint, just the mere mention of Chinese food makes me forget I ever ate lunch at all. Gently, we walk to a road with a visitor’s center and hitch a ride into town in a truck bed full of cases of apples and coolers of fish.

The food is transcendent. It is the best Chinese food I’ve ever had. I eat my whole plate of tofu in black bean sauce with extra broccoli in record time and then I order another, like the greedy greedy hiker that I am. We tape my ankle with KT tape back at the visitor’s center, pitch our tent just down the bend, and settle in.

I’ll try again tomorrow I think as I drift off.

I’m hoping for the best.

—

📍The Mogollon Rim trail is on Yavapai, Western Apache, Hopi and Hohokum land. I am a grateful guest.

I wake up at 5:30AM, then 6:00AM, then 6:30. We are at our friend Caity’s house, up in her loft, sunrise filtering through the skylight. I should get up, but I don’t want to get up. Instead, we just rest.

Eventually it’s undeniable that we should probably hike. This next section, Sedona to Pine, is almost twice as long as the last, with an elevation profile that goes up and up and up before plunging deeply down, over and over again, for 87 miles. We’ve packed six days of food, more than I’ve ever packed before, and the sooner we get going, the sooner I can start cramming my bars down my throat, attempting to make the pack lighter.

Caity is asleep when we leave and so I thank her silently before we quietly close the door. We hitch to our trailhead, and by 9:15 AM, an ungodly late hour, we are hiking.

The trail is full of people at first, but as we climb, the crowds taper off significantly. 2 miles up the trail, we depart from our GPS track and instead take a power line cut, which is a little shorter and steeper. Our friend Drew runs this way with his dog Roscoe, he said it’d be more scenic then a section of trail that parallels the road and we figure YOLO. We like it just fine, that swift and steep cut through. While we’re on it, I think of Roscoe’s special heft, his shiny dog body zooming up the trail, his loyal cadence next to Drew’s.

Today we’ll climb. We’ll climb thousands of feet and we’ll climb for ten miles. There’s water often enough, but a lot of it is cow pond water, water filled with silt and shit, and so if we want to avoid that, we’ll have these climbs with our six days of food and long water carries from our sparse clean sources.

Hmmmm we say. Hmmmm.

I try to distract myself on the ascent. I feel stronger today, my appetite has returned and my nausea has gone away. I feel well rested, our two nights in Sedona filled me with sleep and fresh vegetables. My cuts and bruises have scabbed over. Two days off of my feet allowed my blisters to heal.

All this, and the climb is still hard.

Carrot and I split apart. Every half mile I stop and bend at the waist, sticking my ass out and leaning into my hiking poles. This serves the duel purpose of stretching my hamstrings (they’re screaming) and allowing me to get my head below my heart to catch my breath. I yell fuuuuuuuck a couple of times, to nowhere and nothing, and it is satisfying to hear my voice echo from Mesa to red rock.

I really don’t have the option to be the only person around all that often.

We finish our climb and lunch at a surprise water, it turns out a gloriously wet winter and spring has gifted us with so many surprise waters! All of my food tastes incredible and we make dumb jokes, mostly about how hard our dogs are partying while we suffer. The climb is over and I’m in a good mood.

We have some flat rocky miles. The flat part is incredible and the rocks dismay me, twisting my ankles this way and that. I listen to a podcast about Heavens Gate cult and I like, totally understand how people get sucked into that sort of thing. We ALL want something better don’t we? Something nicer than the status quo?

Carrot and I find one another at a silty stock pond and agree to hike six more miles. If we don’t do that, we have to dry camp, our packs sag heavily on our shoulders and we don’t want to carry more weight. I don’t even know if I COULD carry more weight ? The sun is low in the sky and we get walking.

Our descent is the BDSM of long distance hiking. The terrain is a surprise bushwhack, chaparral and cats claw jabbing at us, grabbing hold and clinging on to our bodies, our poles, our packs. We dub the MRT the Mega Real Trail, because these stabby jabbies aren’t fucking around even a little bit. They want to tear our fragile hiker asses up and we are defenseless against them, but also we sort of like it? In a weird way.

Hours pass. We are poked and prodded and bleeding. It is 6:00PM And we’ve gone 1.5 of six miles. We accept the fact that we may have to dry camp, skip cooking dinner and eat chips instead to save water, camp on a hill or some rocks instead of some perfect flat space. I ponder this, morose, but then suddenly! There are tinajas in the drainage below us! Shallow pools of rock filled with water!!! And a ridge just wide enough to cowboy camp on!

We’ll take it.

—

📍The Mogollon Rim trail is on Yavapai, Western Apache, Hopi and Hohokum land. I am a grateful guest.

Day 3

I wake in the dark and it’s 5:20am. I have transcended time and space with my sleep, and with this morning I am reborn raw and brand new. I have wounds from head to toe, but I am smiling and ready to hike.

This is to say, I wake up feeling good.

There’s no rhyme or reason to the days I wake feeling good or bad when long distance hiking. The first thirty miles of the MRT have leveled me, really shown me challenges of terrain and navigation, exposed my weakest hiking habits. Instead of frustrated, today I am grateful in between the vast red rock and sand. I get to be here, on this land, I am a guest and the least I can do is humbly bow.

Carrot wakes up happy too. She curls into me, unzips my sleeping bag just a little and reaches her arm in. We lay here like this, silent for a long time and as the sun starts to rise, we sit up for our morning chores.

Put the sports bra on, eat, wash pot, brush teeth, fold up the neoair, stuff everything into sacks, wrap everything in trash compactor bags (it’s supposed to rain all day, though the sky looks mostly clear from where we sit.) I do not shit, because I haven’t really shit for the bulk of this section and I am briefly dismayed before I forget about it in order to hike.

We climb up and into Red Rock country and it’s hard not to lose hours of time to my camera. I have never seen anything like this landscape, not in real life anyway, and I want to memorize the contours of its lines so that I may never forget. We gently traverse cross country and the thorny spikeys are minimal today, instead replaced with purple and white wild flowers and soft red mud that squishes gently as we walk.

We climb gently rolling hills through popular trailheads around Sedona, all the brutality of the last few days now replaced with a surreal world of easy walking on tired blister pocked feet. Eventually, we start to ache on the easy tread, both of us with inner thigh chafe and our last miles in sweet juniper forest are a slog, a reminder that when you’re tired enough any kind of tread will happily kick your ass.

From our trailhead at the 49.5 mile mark we hitch a ride into town with a mother of twins. Her kids start school next year and she quit her job to take a year off and travel with them before they do. This story excites me and as she drops us in the Chipotle parking lot, we all wish one another good luck.

Adventure, man. If you’re privileged enough to get it, you really have struck gold.

—

📍The Mogollon Rim trail is on Yavapai, Western Apache, Hopi and Hohokum land. I am a grateful guest.

Day 2

We wake early. Before I open my eyes I feel the soreness of my body ringing up and out of me like a chorus. Shins, knees, elbows, shoulders, hands. All my wounds call out together in a harmony and I am awed and humbled by the sound.

Once packed up, we pass through corridors of grabbing, stabbing and stinging plants that gouge into the pulp of my knees and elbows. I wince as my raw parts are continuously jabbed, steel myself as we cross into a rocky river bed. The bed is dry and contains small, medium, and large boulders– each a different experience to step upon. Our data says we’ll be walking on this for three miles and a quick assessment suggests that three miles will be one mile an hour terrain at the fastest.

One mile an hour is fine with me. The riverbed is flat, and the sun baths us in its gentle way. We have a breeze and just below red rock there are surprise pools of clear, cold water. The pools—some large enough to swim in— aren’t on our data as water sources at all, and so we know that they are but an ephemeral surprise, a gift from our extra rainy year. We sit by a river bed and eat snacks, smiling easily, and then we begin our ascent.

We climb quick and hard, straight up. We lose the trail for a moment, but Carrot finds it again by scrambling a hundred feet above us, hand and footing her way up broken slabs of red rock. I follow. My phone screen goes dim and will not return, briefly depriving me of my GPS track. Just as I yell “CARROT!” into the great trail beyond, it comes back to life, its light embarrassing me as Carrot runs back, concerned. I fall far behind, thinking about this trail and my skills in tandem. I do not have the skills to do this trail, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m hoping that I can learn quickly because in the heat I am feeling so slow and humbled that it borders on ashamed. The terrain is steep and prickly and I walk carefully, trying to avoid the jabbiest of the plants, the ones eager to stab tack like points into my various open wounds. I am morose and I let it wash over me.

We do five miles in five hours, a steady 1mph pace. It is noon and we haven’t travelled far, but we’re hungry and there are cabin ruins and a water source just up ahead and so we agree to stop and reassess.

I tell Carrot how bad I feel. Getting off trail, having so many cuts and bruises from the first five miles of our traverse, having to boulder up to safety when I have no idea how to boulder. Walking through spike corridors, losing my track, going so slowly up steep passes that I may as well be crawling. I eat chips and chocolate and I tell her I am trying to let nature be the boss. I know there’s not much I can do to fix how difficult this is beyond continuing to move forward and improve my skills. I can’t fight my body, and I’m not here to fight the land.

It’s just humbling is all, being so clumsy with nothing to hide behind.

—

We continue to climb, and hours pass. “This terrain is really beating me up today” Carrot says, sitting on a rock next to our water source, eating jerky and shivering into her puffy. She says this so easily, like it’s regular to struggle. All day I’ve questioned myself and my abilities and with one comment I realize the truth: I am inexperienced, for sure, but this is also just a hard trail. All kinds of people would find this to be a hard trail! It’s a relief to know.

We walk up a dirt road, and I zone out to On The Come Up by Angie Thomas. The second half of the day provides terrain that is significantly more gentle and easy to navigate and I let myself relax into it.

Up high, we come to another cabin ruin. Here we find our last water source of the day, a rusty metal tank with dead mosquitos skimming the surface. Winds pick up all around us and we shiver as we filter, knowing we have a 2000 foot descent, that we’re going to get down and camp where it’s warm.

We hike quick. I ache my way toward the campsight, knowing that if we get to the 29.9 mile mark today, we’ll be camping just outside of the camping restriction zone. If we hustle tomorrow, we can make it all the way to town, and I can clean the scrapes that decorate my body, soothe the red ringed wounds with something beyond hand sanitizer and antibiotic ointment.

1.5 miles away from our proposed campsite, I find Carrot. She asks if we can hike the last little bit together, and as we do we say a little prayer to the Nature Gods.

“Please Gods” we say. “Show us a campsite, as flat as a frisbee, just before the restriction starts, and tucked away in some trees”.

We push forward, searching, and just around the bend, directly below some red rock ruins, it appears.

We eat our food staring silently into the abyss, set up our shelter, blow up our neoairs, crawl into our sleeping bags, and close our eyes. Three minutes pass, and I am totally, utterly, and completely asleep.

—

📍The Mogollon Rim trail is on Yavapai, Western Apache, Hopi and Hohokum land. I am a grateful guest.

Day 1

I wake on and off and wonder if it’s time to hike. At 6:40 we open our eyes for real and are surprised to see the late hour. The sun has been up for an hour at least and what are we doing? Snoozing like there’s nowhere to go.

We make a plan to be up and hiking by 7:30AM. I try to eat my cereal and protein powder milk as fast as possible, to chug the cold brew I packed out, to put clothes on and stuff all of my small things into small sacks for my pack. By the time all is said and done, we walk away from our camp at 8:15, wondering where the time went.

We think we’re going to Ford a river, but when we approach it’s really more of a lake than a stream. We walk around it, then cross some ankle deep water and ….that’s it! Nothing so dramatic as a ford.

We climb. We climb up rocky red slopes, up great boulders and tiny pebbles and sand. I feel nauseous again, wonder if I have an ulcer and slowly mince upward, watching Carrot’s graceful stride up the mountain. She is but a speck, and I am concentrating on not gagging while I climb. A cool breeze chases me and I am grateful that I’m nauseous as fuck but at least I’m not nauseous in the heat.

The animal trail I’ve been following peters out, I consult my GPS and can see that I’m off the line. I grumpily try to cut back to it, refusing to backtrack and retrace my steps, and climb over prickly pear and under cats claw branches. I slide my way down some giant slick boulders. I walk and I walk and I really don’t seem to be getting much closer to the track I’m supposed to be on, when it occurs to me that I can use the topo lines to make my way— I don’t have to be aiming myself toward an idea of a line and hoping for the best.

I can see that I need to be aiming for the saddle above me. I retrace my steps back to the slick bolder I carefully stepped down and when I go to climb back up I can see that there are no real handles to grab onto, no real steps for my feet.

I tell myself that I hand and footed my way down this boulder, I can get back up. I toss my poles up just above me, feel my way up the sides of the red rock, and look for a crevasse to wedge my hand, promising to accept even the tiniest outcrop for my foot. I find both, eventually, and I know I just need two more of each to get back up toward stable ground. I slide my hand up again, and eventually, there’s a hook for my fingers. I commit to wedging my foot hard into the nothingness that will be my step, and somehow it sticks. I feel my my way up the boulder again, almost to the top now, and look down for just a second. What the fuck am I doing here? Climbing a boulder in the middle of red rock desert with no one around for probably miles? My left leg starts shaking violently and I lose my grip, sliding back down from where I started from. My poles come crashing down on my face as soon as I hit the ground.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!!! I scream to no one. Ringing silence meets me.

I am scratched with raspberries of blood dotting my knees, elbows, shins and stomach. I almost had it, I’m convinced I almost had it. I know where I have to be to get on track, it’s just a few hundred feet up. If I can get above this bolder it’ll be low and gentle cross country to the trail and it’ll be easy enough from there. Easier than this, I think. Easier than fake bouldering with absolutely no skills or experience. I toss my poles up, repeat the same exact choreography of arms and legs, and again, I slide right back down.

I am going to throw up. My breath starts to quicken and I weigh my options. In my slow stupor I’d shooed Carrot away hours ago and she is surely very far along the trail, and I am even further from that. I could call for help, but I’ve seen no footprints and when I listen hard I hear only profound quiet. There are helicopters, is this a helicopter situation? I start to cry and I can feel myself on an edge, this close to panic. I rip myself back.

No. A voice says from deep inside. You are not going to panic yet.

Here are some facts the voice inside gives to me: it is early, only 11AM. It’s not hot. I have three liters of water, and a lot of food. I have service and I can text Carrot and wait. I have service and if things become dire I can actually call a helicopter.

And besides the voice says. You’re pack is making you too heavy to pull yourself up.

I drink some water, steady my breathing, and take my pack off, tossing it above with my poles. I tell myself I will not look down, that I’m bored of standing here just a few hundred feet from where I’m supposed to be and I hurdle myself up, as fast as possible; no stopping allowed. When I land on bloody hands and knees next to my pack and my poles, finally away from my place just below where I wanted to be, I sob.

What the fuck, Muffy. What in the actual fuck.

—-

I walk in a daze, cramming vegan cheez-itz into my mouth and crying. The terrain is gentle, I find the trail easily using the topo lines, and my body is moving in the right direction, which is kind of all that matters. I feel fried though, deeply exhausted by the stress of my morning and by the time I reach a cow pound, just 6 trail miles in, I could collapse.

I think about stopping but I want to see Carrot, want to hug her and make jokes with her and let her soothe me in her way. She’s left me a note at the cow pound, it says she waited for half an hour but is heading on, she’ll meet me at the next water source in another five miles.

I commit to the next five miles and fly down cattle trails, drinking and eating while I walk instead of taking a lunch break. My whole body aches, my shirt is torn and I am bleeding. Just two miles later I see Carrot’s pack poking out from a sycamore tree and I whoop. CARROT!!!!!! I am SO FUCKING HAPPY to see CARRRROTTTT!

I show Carrot my wounds. She rubs my back and listens sympathetically, we game plan for how to check in from here on out to keep us close together. It starts hailing gently while we sit, almost snowflake like pebbles, except it is 70 degrees, dry everywhere and sunny so nothing is sticking. A storm is threatening, though, a dark grey cloud headed our way, surrounded by only blue sky.

Time to walk we say, zipping up rain jackets and putting on shoes as quick as we can.

It’s the desert man. Never really can tell what’s about to happen.

—

📍The Mogollon Rim trail is on Yavapai, Western Apache, Hopi and Hohokum land. I am a grateful guest.