Water. A life or death resource on the Arizona Trail. Today we had a reminder of how precious this resource truly is.

Early in the morning, as we were packing up camp, a hiker going the opposite direction let us know that a creek in 2 miles was flowing. With this information in hand we decided not to fill our bottles at camp and enjoy a couple miles with lighter packs before topping off our bottles. Two miles later, to our surprise, we were unable to find this flowing creek. Every creek we came across was dry. We even spent time looking up and down the creek beds for water as we passed them. No water was to be found.

At this point we weren’t stressed as recent comments in the water report stated there were small pools in an old creek bed a couple miles ahead. So, we trekked on. An hour later we reached the old creek bed to find that the small pool was unfortunately full of cow patties. Beautiful fresh cow patties. At the site of this we decided that we would try for the next set of pools recently mentioned in the water report and moved on. Unfortunately, they had dried up. Defeated we continued on checking every creek bed, windmill tank, cow trough, ect.

Passing up that small pool with cow poo in it left us trekking 8.5 miles with roughly 2/3rds of a liter of water each. Less than half of what we needed. The moral of the story is... when you’re in the desert... take the cow shit water.

Daily Mileage: 11.0 Total AZT Miles Backpacked: 25.7 of 788.7