wind farms and water

day 13 ~ miles 206 ~ 228ish

The fact that we began setting up the tent in a valley by a wind farm should have been a huge red flag...but we were tired and we did it anyway.  It was soo windy, the stove was inefficient and our mac and cheese was undercooked...bummer.

I awoke in the night to a frantic Moonshine, or maybe he just seemed frantic beacuse he was yelling because I had earplugs in to quiet the noisy winds.  A couple of the tent stakes had come out of the ground, and our tent was bowing and flapping violently in the wind.  We took the pole out and collapsed the tent onto ourselves.  Never again will we setup the tent next to a wind farm.

Our guidebook pointed out that we could get water from the Mesa Wind Farm office.  We wandered up and the employees were standing ariund chatting.  They directed us inside the office, into the employee break room, where Quinoa, Half&half, and Soapbox sat in the dark...we were surprised and humored.  We sat and ate and laughed in the dark...there was a scheduled power outage, so none of the wind turbines were on either.

The rest of the day, we climbed around, above, up and into some beautiful canyons.  From the rim of one canyon, we could see the gray canyon floor, and were wondering if there was water down there. We descended into the canyon to find gray water, thick with silt.  There was a huge shade spot, where we had lunch with the 3 guys and soaked our feet in the silty stream....the first opportunity to do so.

We hiked out and down into another canyon, where we crossed Mission Creek several times (more running water!) until we found an excellent creekside campsite where we camped with the 3 guys.