I wake up feverish, my sleep clothes clingy with sweat. Too hot to breathe! I tear open our sleeping quilt and flap it around to sweep cold air in. I experience relief for 60 seconds. Then my sweat, now cold, plummets my body temp. I shiver and bundle again.
^ I’ve been doing this routine lately. After a steady string of nights below freezing, my body’s climate control doesn’t know how to cope with mild temperatures. Or maybe I just need to be braver and sleep in fewer layers. As we say, be bold, start cold.
This morning I’m on my feet quickly. It’s cache party day! Yeti materializes right on time at 830 to swoop us from Grosvenor Arch. Yeti has officially adopted us and we’ve temporarily retired from hitchhiking. As long as he’s around, we have built in rides! Which is most excellent today because it means we can car zoom over the 7 bonus miles our car couldn’t cover one month ago when we buried this cache.
I find the cache easily thanks to the tower of cow pies I constructed on top of it. We dig up our buckets and explode their treasures. Then sort and pack those treasures as we destroy a box of Oreos.
When we buried this cache, it was dusky, raining and cold. I remember scanning the shrubland around me and thinking, I can’t live out in this terrain. What the hell am I doing? Turns out, I can and I am. Heh heh!
Yeti drops us back off on the route. Thank you, Yeti!! Next up is Round Valley Draw. According to the ranger in town, this area recently had a “hundred year flood” which complicates our planned descent into what our map describes as “EXCELLENT narrows.” Bummer. So instead, we follow a faint trail above the rim of the slot until we can scramble down to its floor and check out the slot from inside as well. The acoustics are bonkers. Bird shadows race across the 1000 foot canyon walls. I feel tiny.
The Round Valley Draw narrows widen into Hackberry Canyon — a wide boulevard of sand between peach colored walls and yellow fins of rock. The wind is positively ripping. It sends small tornadoes of sand whipping around the bends of the canyon. My eyes and teeth (anything exposed and moist) crust with sand. The walking is tough too. My calves sting as I trudge through the sand. It’s an unfamiliar pain. I must be walking in sand wrong, I conclude. I make a mental note to Google “how to walk in sand without hurting yourself” when I’m in town.
Till then, it’s sand storms and stingy legs. I feel wrung out by the time we pick a sleeping spot under an overhang of rock. Oh to be horizonal. I worry over the calf pain while humming birds and bats flit around the dark. May sleep mend my legs 🙏
The Importance of Elsewhere 
Such an ordeal to be bombarded with the trashing sand storms invading your every inch. By now it is over, you are all scrubbed up and enjoying your days. Love all your photos!
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