Hiker haven

Today we woke up and got packing, excited to get out of the water for a minute and grab some food at Doc Campbells. We also realized we had our dates slightly off while calculating mileage, so we actually have more breathing room than we had thought, which is nice since the trail is tough to find at times and the river crossings definitely slow us down a bit. 

At about 8.8 miles to get out of the Gila and onto the road that would take us to Docs (about another 1.2 miles), we decided to just kick it out in one go, and not take a little break after about 2 or 3 hours. 

It only took us about 3.5 hours to get to the road, so we were able to maintain a decent pace, and the trail was much easier to find today. All good things. 

The not so good thing was that Ben took a step and felt a shooting pain in his knee. With about 2.5 more miles to the road at that point, he decided to tough it out and make it to Docs without much of a break. At a bit of a limp, he was able to make it safe and sound. 

When we arrived at Docs, it was closed. We were very confused, it was midday, I had spoken with them earlier about supply, so knew they didn’t have any planned closings. We were a bit nervous for a second. However, as we got closer we saw a sign on the door that said closed for medical emergency, will be back around 2:30. We were told be a fellow hiker that the owners daughter had a tooth problem and had to go into Silver City to get it taken care of. 

Between our miscalculation last night, Bens knee, and late opening of the store, we decided to take the 10 mile day and use the second half of the day to rest up. 

The best part? This was a hiker haven. 20 hikers left this morning, and by the end of the night we had about 9-10 hikers all hanging around. Ben was able to get his real first taste of hiker trash. It was a good evening, indeed.