The Little Dry Creek Trail – A Trail Crew Paradox

Written by Julia Heitz, an extended conservation crew member with the Los Valles Region:

View from the Little Dry Creek Trail (neither little nor dry)

There’s really only one way to describe life on a technical crew- it’s an adventure every day. One of my favorite instances of this happened on our hike out of the Gila National Forest  in New Mexico. We had about a 5 or 6 mile hike to the trailhead and our rig. The map showed the trail running along “Little Dry Creek” and crossing it a couple times. As it turned out, Little Dry Creek was neither little, nor dry. To make matters worse (and, ultimately, funnier), the map wasn’t on a large enough scale to show that the trail actually crossed Little Dry Creek twenty two times. We found ourselves carrying 50 or 60 pound packs and tools across what seemed to us to be a raging river, complete with whitewater rapids and waterfalls. The water was usually at least mid-calf deep and up to our mid-thighs a couple times. There was no chance of keeping your lower body dry and we all spent a lot of energy making sure we didn’t fall in and get our packs soaked. It was fitting that we would all end up waterlogged at the very end of the hitch. We spent the preceding week

Working through the haze

 living in clouds and dealing with daily afternoon storms that soaked all of our things. It was as if Gila wouldn’t let us get out of the wilderness anything less than soaked. It was a fairly miserable experience, but absolutely hilarious at the same time. Each time the trail led back across the stream, you just had to laugh. We reached the trailhead less than an hour after the last creek crossing and the creek certainly made for a memorable and entertaining hike to end the hitch.