21.8 miles
788.7 AZT mile marker
It was a cold night; perhaps my coldest on the trail. It was probably in the low 20s or high teens. We were just in some sort of cold pocket. We woke early to a convoy of about 50 trucks hauling empty shipping containers to the border since AZ is building their own wall. Tons of noise and rattling. Lots of Border Patrol as well but no one paused at our camp.
There was heavy frost on our tents. When I shook mine out in the morning, there was about a snowball worth of snow inside my tent. Such a heavy coating. Packed the tents up frozen and got up my fortitude to get out of my warm clothes and into my lighter hiking clothes. At the last minute as always.
Almost as soon as we crossed the stream we were camped by, the temperature warmed significantly. We were definitely in a very localized cold spot. Oh well, we made it through the night.
We crisscrossed the stream as we worked our way up it. We were on the start of a climb up into our final mountain range, the Huachuca Mountains. The creek ascent was very gradual for a while and pretty easy. We strolled across grassy fields and through forests. As the trail rose more, the surrounds changed to all forest with good size trees for this area. It was a nice walk up, and different than the surrounding desert we have been passing through.
The trail eventually ran out of creek to follow and we started steeply up switchbacks to finish the ascent to the ridge. I sort of like the steeper climbs since it gets you up the mountain quick, and since we are in good hiking shape now it wasn’t too difficult. We crested the ridge after a 3,000 foot climb this morning and took a lunch break at a clear spot where we could see off both sides of the ridge with flat desert and sporadic mountains around us.
We had been planning to camp on the ridge as close to the end of the trail as we could, but we assumed it would be even colder than it was at our camp last night and we weren’t looking forward to that. We would also have to get up pretty early to finish the trail and make it to our shuttle in time. We decided that we were close enough that we would just finish out the trail tonight and then figure out where to camp. It felt more fitting to me to have a bigger day into the end rather than a short few miles to tag the border.
With a new purpose, we continued on down the ridge after our tents were dried in the sun and wind. The trail followed the range for the rest of the day. Sometimes on the ridge, and sometimes skirting peaks. It was a great and scenic trail through a wilderness area. A fitting last hurrah of the trail.
We leapfrogged with Kelley and Chuckwagon who also intended to finish today. They had a friend meeting them at the end and we asked if there was extra water in their car but they were unsure. We filled up water at the last spring on the trail flowing into an old bathtub with enough for the rest of the day and night. The birds were quite pissed that we were at their watering hole.
We climbed to near Miller Peak, the high point of the range and namesake of the wilderness area, but it didn’t even cross my mind to take the short side trail to the summit. The border was the goal and our only purpose. The summit looked dramatic and rocky, but not on this hike.
The trail then started to forever wind down, undoing all of the climbing we did today. It was nicely graded but it went down, down, down. We arrived at Montezuma Pass, which is the trailhead for the terminus. Took a break and emptied trash. We also left our water for the night behind since we would descend to the border and have to climb right back up. We carried our packs, but no need for the extra water at the moment.
Then it was just a downhill sprint to the finish. We flew down the 1.8 miles which disappeared in no time, and we came at last to the boundary marker that we had been walking towards since we started the hike. It didn’t really hit me that I had finished, perhaps since we still had to climb back up. I will need time off trail to process.
We posed and took our pictures and spent a little time at the border before we headed back up. We shortly met Kelley and Chuckwagon who handed each of us a beer! The climb back up wasn’t very difficult and didn’t take much time. We got back to the trailhead around sunset, to enjoy it for the last time.
Kelley and Chuckwagon’s ride was at the trailhead and offered refills of food and water. We all regrouped and chatted until after dark, when we had to go and find some place to camp. It would have been great to camp at the trailhead but there were lots of hiker comments about being harassed by rangers, so we walked down the gravel road looking for a spot to camp. We stopped at a windy pullout on the road and did our best to pitch our tents. Kevin and my tents are not freestanding, and it was about impossible to get stakes into the hard ground. I broke 2 stakes and just slightly got the others into the ground. I weighted everything down with rocks to prevent a stake from pulling up in the high winds and we had a last trail meal with our beers.
When we went to bed, my horrible tent pitch and missing stakes were apparent with the wind blowing my tent in on me, alternately pressing against me. I curled up into the smallest ball possible and managed to catch some sleep.
A lot of early morning traffic the next morning and my last coyote serenade along with some turkeys gobbling. A bad camp, but you just have to make it work on the long distance hikes. Everything isn’t going to work out ideally. We have a shuttle at 9:30 at the trailhead to take us to Tucson, so a lazy start before we started our journey back to beds, porcelain, all the water you can drink, and all the food you can eat.
2 comments
Congratulations on completing the AZT. I finished your AZT blog this afternoon. Enjoyed revisiting my AZT hike of 2014-2015 (two long sections due to time constraints) as your text and photos brought back memories.
Congrats, Max! Finished your blog just in time to grill you about the trail at work later this week!