We camped along the road / wash in the sand in saddle Rock canyon, one night before we would enter Silver City. In the night Kylie thought she heard something wrestling around the wash and going past our camp. In the morning we discovered fairly fresh bear prints passing our camp and followed them for about 0.2 mil3s. Who knows if that’s what we heard, but nothing really disturbed us all night.
The next morning we hitched a ride with a woman named Cindy who has section height some of this trail. She dropped us off at the local outfitter downtown, we bought gear and followed up with lunch and made our way across town to check into our hotel. Kylie’s feet needed a zero day to heal her blisters before we wait up a river. Unfortunately, I woke up in the middle of the night with stuff coming out of both ends. I was still pretty sick the next morning so he added one more night to our stay. Fat burrito? Who knows. Waterborne illnesses take longer to set in and last a lot longer than this did.
This morning we’re finally making it back to the trail. We kicked around Silver City a little bit yesterday, went to the museum, ate some local food, and started preparing alternate routes for this coming section. An unseasonable week of thunderstorms is moving in and considering our Trail follows the Middle fork of the Gila River directly, we thought it necessary to plan some high water alternates in case some of this rain reaches this watershed. We have a pretty good set of plans and exit points/backtracks to get us to another Trail so we can avoid the river if we need to. Our next stop is Doc Campbell’s post in the middle of Gila National Forest directly on the river and we will reevaluate there.