A number of people have been asking me about my holy shit day so here it is.

I left Kearney early in the morning and followed along the Gila river for a number of miles, although most of the time I was too far up the mountain to be able to reach the river. I did drop down about midday and took a break, thinking I would push the next 7 miles where I could get water and camp for the night. Well little did I know what the trail had for me.

I was nearing what’s called the low point on the trail and in someways for me it really was a low point. The elevation in that spot is just barely 200 feet higher than where I live in Vermont and I guess you could say that from there, everything will be uphill. But I had to get down to the river to get water for the night. Twilight was approaching and I was in a wash when I heard of familiar buzzy rattling sound and sure enough there was a rattlesnake warning me from the trail. Luckily, this one wasn’t too aggressive, and after waving my polls, it headed off the trail and I was able to get past uneventfully.

Darkness was falling by the time I hit the side trail down to the river, which was the last place I would have water for a while. As I started down the side road, I heard that buzzing again and before I could locate the source, I saw a dark figure strike out at my polls. I’ve learned in rattlesnake country to hike with my polls in front of me. Thus my polls were more in the line of the strike than my leg although neither got hit. Onn high alert, I got past that snake and kept going down the road before I looked at my app and realized that it looked like I should have turned off at a short way back. This meant I had to walk back past that rattlesnake again. Relieved that while it did rattle, this time it did not strike out at me.

I saw where it looked like I should drop down into a wash under a high barware fence. but it was pitched dark in that wash and I decided I would take my chances continuing on the road. I did a 180 and walked back down the road again, breathing a sigh of relief when I went past the place where the rattlesnake had been. Well, I breathe the sigh of relief too soon and within a few hundred yards there was a striking rattlesnake. I let out a yelp and jumped back and once again escaped being struck.

I finally reached the Gila River, filled up my bag in the oncoming gloam and thought “I want to get out of here.” So even though I was tired and it was dark, I went back up that rattlesnake infested road.

I got back to the junction. I had left the trail and started to climb, thinking I was leaving the rattlesnakes behind. But before I got up to a high saddle where I was able to camp, I got struck at for the third time that evening.

The ground was so hard that it was almost impossible to get the tent stakes into it, and I thought about cowboy camping without my tent, but that evening I needed the false sense of protection that the tent around me provided. My nervous system was on high alert and I had to force myself to calm down.

I was grateful that I was tired enough to fall into a really deep sleep. But in the morning I noticed that every stick on the trail looked like a rattlesnake, especially after I did see one early in the morning. I thought about how we see what we look for in life and when we’ve had some negative experiences, we often are in higher alert, looking for and expecting more negative experiences. Then we interpret things from that negative worldview and think people are insulting us or that the worst is happening. I resolved not to go down that road, and I While I acknowledged that part of myself that was on high alert for rattlesnakes, I worked to focus instead on the incredible beauty of the flowers around me.

So even though it was holy shit day, I was grateful for the reminder it gave me to focus on the beauty and not just that trauma and pain of my past experiences. And I laugh now every time I see a stick that looks like a snake.