leaving Los Alamos, with apologies to Nicolas Cage
heat dome
Record high temps in NM this weekend, and I wasn’t in the mood for it. I also wanted a real shower and a walmart run.
logistical SNAFU
I actually knew about the heatwave on wednesday, and should have left that night in order to get to the next spot on Thursday. Boondocking spots tend to fill up on Fri/Sat/Sun so I do my best not to arrive on any of those.
But I didn’t, so things were a little tight. My plan was:
- break camp
- wait until sundown so temps will be bearable for doggo and I
- drive to Santa Fe
- hit the walmart first because it closes at 11pm
- hit the planet fitness for an actual shower
- head up to 10,000ft
I also wanted to fit in a laundry run but I couldn’t find any 24hr ones
moving out
Everything went pretty much to plan.
I headed out, stopping on the way to fill my water tank. Not sure how long I will be sequestered on the next mountaintop. It’s steep enough that I’m not running back to SF for supplies. I didn’t fill the gas tank. Still had a half tank and didn’t want to haul up any more weight than necessary.
arriving at 10,000ft
I got to the mountain at about 2am; Muffin had her head out the window the entire time. I was delighted to see I had two bars on H20 Wireless (AT&T MVNO). I sometimes had 1 bar of Visible (Verizon MVNO). the H2O line is for emergency backup and so only has 1GB of data. Visible is unlimited so I’ll try to batch uploads in those tiny windows of opportunity. I was able to get a text out to my sister and daughter to let them know I’ll be out of the mix for a while, data-wise.
[this post is composed offline. Next time the visible data comes back up it will be rsynched up to the server.]
temperature
It is quite mild. I wore long pants until lunch, and was comfortable in shorts the rest of the day.
water
Snow runoff from high-altitude lakes is still running strong. I made coffee and did all my washing with crudely strained water; I wanted to get the sandy bits and water fauna out. The water is cold….
That’s it for now. Will try to get this uploaded.