Chama

About 11pm-12am, I heard splattering against the tent and I thought for some odd reason it would just be dust or something other than what it really was, snow. The snow flew in from the side of the tall pavilion and hit us from an angle. Even the large rooftop couldn’t protect us at all. 

My tent is freestanding, and I had set it up inside the pavilion. However, the trade off for being such a light weight tent is that I have to pull out fly doors with stakes or rocks. Since I didn’t have them pulled out (but luckily I had them rolled down on the windy side) there was plenty of water and snow that got in the side of my tent. My sleeping bag got wet as did most my gear. But more importantly Roger That had slept on top of one of the picnic tables and had gotten completely soaked by the time he woke up and noticed. 

When we finally “woke up” the snow had thickened and not slowed since it began in the wee hours of the night. A few inches accumulated faster and faster and we grew colder and colder in our wet gear. Since RT was outside of his tent, his sleeping bag was completely soaked through. 

With another 42 miles until we were going to hit the road into Chama where RT planned to roll into town, and another 60 or so until the spot I had planned to stop, we decided it best to get off trail now and dry off our gear. 

Man oh man, it didn’t stop coming down either. I had sent a message to my mom to give a couple places in town a call (I didn’t have any cell service so used my text only satellite communicator) so we could not freeze in our wet gear, and eventually we found two hikers (Beer Goddess and Lone Wolf) who were able to get a car from the hotel owner to come scoop us up. 

Even though it was only a couple hours since we had planned to jump off, the snow had accumulated quite a bit and was sticking around. 

We got into town, dried off, ate some food, and rested. There wasn’t much sleep last night, that’s for sure!