Cleaning up the bear mess, reflections on the burglary, and getting back on the road/trail...
You've got your known knowns; these are challenges that you are certain to face and can prepare for. Then you've got your known unknowns; these are challenges that you may face, but you're not sure how, or in what form. Then you've got your unknown unknowns; these are the toughest challenges, the ones that come out of left field.
After taking care of the essential repairs that Friday in Albuquerque, i had time to truck over to the local walmart to replenish some essentials. And while walmart certainly is a good place to get a bunch of stuff all at once, trying to find a wearable pear of jeans there is enough to send me back to the wilderness...
But first i had to get my car, gear and the remaining food "de-beared." This process entailed emptying the car and cleaning it as best as i could, bringing the gear and food inside my room to be cleaned in the tub, and tipping the maid well.
As you might imagine, this took the better part of saturday, but i still had time to get down to the historic city center, where they were holding a local festival. A lot of fun, including a mariachi band on the gazebo. I also had an incredible dinner on a small, private patio with a waterfall behind me, where they allowed me to sit and write until the end of the night, keeping my coffee mug fresh.
So with the bliss that accompanies a belly full of chile rellenos and good coffee, i was able to put the whole experience in perspective:
In planning the trip, i knew that while on trail, i was certain to encounter some of the aforementioned "unknown unknowns." I resolved that i would be objective, and not resent the obstacle, creating an adversarial (counter productive) frame of thinking. This attitude had served me well in Rocky Mtn NP, as i enjoyed myself immensely in the face of some serious slop on the ground there.
I realized that since the day earlier i had looked at the whole break-in thing through the same prism. I believe that one can't resent the turn of circumstance itself, even if it was an evil act that created it. Since i wasn't looking at the break-in as a "bad" or "unfortunate" thing, i was able to treat it like any other obstacle
So it is really our response to circumstance, not the circumstance itself, that determines if it will be "bad/unfortunate" or "good/lucky." For example, i mentioned earlier that i had lost my compass while in the Cruces Basin, while navigating off trail. I reminded myself at the time that this was going to be what i made of it; a chance to test either my navigating skills or my rescue beacon...
Since i was moving much slower w/o the compass, i had to spend the night of the 5th in the woods, instead of making it back to the car. However, had i made it to the car as planned, one of 2 things would've happened. Either i would've returned to the car to discover the car burglarized and not enough day left to do anything about it, or worse, run into the bear in the act. I may even have decided to sleep next to the car, and been in camp there when the bear arrived...
If i had cursed the lost compass from the beginning, i would look back and say "blessing in disguise," and have felt silly for getting angry earlier. But by keeping neutral about the situation from the get go, no disguise, and no wasted emotion.
And the final lesson i'll take from the experience concerns my somewhat lax "bear practices." I've never really feared black (as opposed to grizzly) bears; almost all of my hiking has been in black bear territory, and the most that i'll do is hang my food bag, and not even that all the time. And i'm also guilty of frequently keeping snacks in my tent at night. I fell into the trap of thinking that the black's reputation as a shy animal (as opposed to the grizzly) and small size (again, relative to the grizzly, not me-more importantly) made them a species to be taken lightly. Nevermore, I say!!! After seeing the size of the tracks, rips in the car, and general destruction that bear caused, i am a convert!
So on Sunday, i set off from Albuquerque, headed back towards the "4 Corners" area. Along the way, i stopped at a volcano cone/ice caves park in NM, and hiked a few miles. It was billed as "Fire and Ice," which was a little misleading. The fire was 10,000 yrs extinct, and the ice caves were incorrectly pluralized, as it was just one 200ft square pool. But it was great to get my boots dusty again, and even though it was oversold a bit, it was worth the stop to see the lava flows.
That night i got into a hotel in cortez, co, and set out the next day to see Mesa Verde NP. This is the home of the cliff dwellings, inhabited first by the Ancestral Puebloans (1000BCE-1000CE,) then later by the Anasazi. The settlement was nestled into the valleys and cliffs of 9,000' mesas. I hiked a few miles there also, enjoyed the archaeology immensely, and set out for Canyonlands after lunch to see if i could start my hike a day early.
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