Imposing. Awe-inspiring. It’s hard to find words to describe the rest of the Gila alternate route. After leaving Doc Campbells, we took a 5 mile detour to visit the 700 year old Gila Cliff Dwellings, where the Mogollon people lived for a single generation before moving on.

The trail took us up the middle fork of the Gila River, so crossings were more shallow than during the first leg. The cliffs along the way were, for me, the best part. Reddish copper and slate-colored spires towered above the river, encrusted with mint green lichens. The spires bulged together to form what looked like castle turrets. It was impossible to accurately capture the cliffs with a camera, though I certainly tried. In many places, the cliffs closed in around the river in all directions so tightly you could feel the immense weight of their looming presence.

“I feel like we should be in a movie,” remarked Britta at one point. I felt it too – the surreal, epic feeling given off by the cliffs dwarfing us.

This stretch wasn’t without its challenges, though. Two mornings we woke up to find our wet shoes had frozen stiff. I still managed to somehow get mine on, and they thawed fairly quickly.

Out of all the wildlife we saw during this leg of the hike – elk, deer, great blue herons, wild turkeys, five trillion lizards – we only saw snakes on one day. And on that day, we saw four. Three quickly slithered away, but one lay stretched and unmoving across the entire path. Britta, who was walking in front, stopped quickly to avoid walking right over the red, black, and white striped snake. “Snake!” she exclaimed.

Fortunately, I remembered that there was a rhyme to determine if a snake was poisonous by which color the red stripe was next to. Unfortunately, I only remembered the part which went ‘red touches yellow, kills​ a fellow’. For black touches red, which applied to the snake in front of us, the only rhyme my brain would conjure was ‘black touches red, super dead’.

We gave the snake a wide berth.

(For the record, the actual rhyme is ‘Red touches black, venom lacks. Red touches yellow, kills a fellow.’)

We also, er, slightly underestimated our growing hiker hunger, and had to carefully ration food the last few days. Since we were hiking into a town literally called Pie Town, known for its pies, the promise of delicious pie loomed large and ever present above us.

After leaving the river, we rejoined the official CDT, and with no more slow river crossings we were able to increase our daily milage to 20 miles a day for the last five days into Pie Town.

During this time, we walked through a whistling forest. (My name for it, not an official name.) A fire had scorched the area and left only charred, black trunks. As we entered this burnt landscape, an unexpected sound reached my ears. “Do you hear that?” I asked Britta. A nearby tree was whistling a high, eerie note in the wind. We moved past the tree, yet the whistling seemed to follow us as we walked; each tree had its own note. When the wind rose, a dissonant symphony of ghostly whistling broke out, quickly rising to frantic levels. It was definitely one of the strangest and most fascinating things I’ve ever heard.

We finally arrived in Pie Town and made our way to the Toaster House, a fabulous and free hostel for hikers, made possible by the amazing Nita. With hot showers, laundry, and food, it’s honestly almost too good to be true. Britta and I are taking our first zero day (zero milage) here, and plan to relax a bit before hitting the trail again tomorrow.

Also, I finally got my pie – a warm slice of red raspberry pie. It was delicious.