Section 26 is 87.7 miles long and runs from Lordsburg, New Mexico to MEXICO!!! The Hachita ruins were fascinating and I took a lot of photos so I am breaking this section into two parts. The second is my final day on trail. My final December 3rd.
Day 163, 18.1 miles to the Southern Terminus at Crazy Cook Monument, Mexico + a 12-mile backtrack to rendezvous with Sea Lion
PS took off around 530am and her rustling around camp woke me up. I figured I may as well get moving and maximize my time to celebrate at the Crazy Cook Monument at the CDT’s Southern Terminus. My rain fly was again covered in frost and the tip of my thumb split open from the sheer coldness as I was packing it up. The sunrise was a nice setting as I hiked some early miles and soon my mind wandered all over the place. Today was it. The last day of the CDT. The last day of the Triple Crown. The finish line of a goal five years in the making. I remembered the Halloween party in 2014 when my good friend Karrot was sharing tales of his PCT Thru-Hike from that same year. This was the moment I first had the thought “I want to do that. I want to hike not just the PCT, but all three trails.”
Final sunrise of the Triple Crown.
Golden hour morning light kissing the Hatchet Mountains.
There was a nice long stretch of Commodore Road that a regular car could have passed and I hoped Sea Lion could navigate the initial stretch with it’s many treacherous ruts. She sent a Garmin text saying she was about three hours away, which should be right about when I arrive at the border. I realized she would lose cell service soon and not be able to download the new waypoints that I uploaded from the Garmin, so I began to build physical ones; arranging lines of rocks to block wrong turns or drawing big arrows in the mud or sand. I got to the Mangus Tank which has a cartoonish looking hole blown through one of it’s walls. It looked like a smaller entrance wound on the far wall with a much larger exit wound on the closer wall of the structure. Did one of those jet fighter pilots get bored and shoot a missile at this? Do missiles make entrance and exit wounds like bullets?
CDT has endless supplies of cows, old cabins, and dead windmills.
Entry wound and exit wound?
When I reached the 2.8 miles to the border sign, I put my music on shuffle and it seemed to know what I was about to accomplish. Metallica’s Wherever I May Roam, Rusted Root’s Send Me On My Way, and other songs were right there to accompany me to the finish line. I was the last to arrive as I took the longer road walk and was leaving breadcrumbs, but the whole crew was there. Turns out Sunny, Snow White, and Nightwatch camped a mere two miles ahead of PS and I last night and they made a huge fire hoping to signal us to keep hiking and join them at camp. Dang, that would’ve been a terrific final night, chilling with all of the last lonely SLOBOs. We shared many hugs and high fives, took tons of photos at the monument, and congratulated each other for finishing the longest, most remote, and most rugged trail this country has to offer.
163 days and 3100 miles apart.
The SLOBOs! The final Thru-Hikers to finish the CDT this year.
I was so on top of the world that I totally forgot that I packed out some fireworks from Lordsburg! I got a cryptic GPS text from Sea Lion that she spoke with numerous border patrol agents who told her that Commodore Road was completely impassable and a truck got stranded just yesterday. I wondered if that was related to the tow truck I saw the previous night. It was already 3pm so backtracking 26 miles to the road and then a three hour drive to El Paso to catch a 7am flight would be a very tight window. Even more so since I was out of food. I convinced Sea Lion she had to try. Trust the breadcrumbs. The other hikers were starting to make contingency plans with a hotel clerk in town who sometimes will run a shuttle to grab hikers. Night fell as we continued backtracking down the road. I was nearing 30 miles on the day and had no idea how much further we needed to go until we crossed paths with Sea Lion. I finally saw some headlights bobbing ahead near the Double Tank. I was overflowing with excitement as I started to run towards the truck and she was also feeling the same as she almost forgot to put it in park before hopping out. Our meeting looked very similar to this clip from The Mandalorian:
Everyone piled into the truck and I took over driving duties. After a few miles, we picked up General, Catalyst, and Ice Man who had skipped ahead to go NOBO from Crazy Cook to the highway. Numerous times the ruts in the road were so deep I had to kick everyone out of the truck to lighten the weight and gain some inches of ground clearance. The trio told us how they got a ride down from SWAT and it was his rental truck that got stranded. General said they took a different road that connects to Commodore Road and it had this huge pond in the middle that looked like it could have been a legit lake. SWAT just drove straight at it, full speed ahead, until his truck stalled out. Then, like a captain going down with his ship, he told them to save themselves. He insisted he would be fine waiting there overnight for a tow truck, as he was equipped with enough provisions, one bottle of wine. We later learned from SWAT that the first tow truck to retrieve him also got stuck, the second tow truck broke it’s axle, and the third truck (the one I saw) was sent to save all the others. Truck #3 was attempting to reach them from a more passable route.
I thought it was funny that we passed a few border patrol checkpoints while in a rental truck, crammed with nine people and backpacks, coming straight from the direction of the Mexican border, and they didn’t blink an eye. Our horde stopped at a McDonalds in Lordsburg for a final hiker-trash meal and then we all parted ways. It was just past 1am when Sea Lion and I got on I-10 to blast the 170 miles to El Paso. We then had to find a 24-hour car wash to give the truck a deep clean since it looked thoroughly destroyed after ferrying eight muddy hikers and their packs through some gnarly off-road terrain. It isn’t that sketchy to wash your 24-hour rental vehicle at three in the morning, right? We completely skipped the AirBNB we had booked and went straight to the airport. It was 5am by the time we returned the truck, checked bags, and got through security. We slept like the dead once we finally got to our new home to Austin, Texas.
