Now that my mom has gone back to L.A., leaving me with the second truck and trailer, for the next two months I will be completely self-supported as I ride. So after taking yesterday off to make some food and water caches, today I loaded the horses into the trailer and headed back out to the trail.

We drove to the Gabe Zimmerman trailhead, where we got back on the AZT and went southbound towards Patagonia. Overall it was a pretty easy and relatively flat day though it was hot early on. We stopped for water from a stock pond halfway through the day. One of the most reliable sources of water along the trail so far has been the tanks and ponds that ranchers create to water their cattle; the horses are happy with the water, although I imagine some of the hikers don't find it too attractive. The shoreline of the pond was so muddy that I had to retrieve the water for the horses with a bucket, but that's often been the case at these stock areas. We also ran into a cranky gopher snake who hissed a lot and tried to pretend that he was a rattlesnake by coiling and shaking the tip of his tail. By the end of the day, we covered 24 miles to another stock tank off of a dirt rode close to Highway 83, where we set up camp for the night.

#2017AZT