Always Prepared: Wandering on Camp May Road Route

Today I finally went up to the Camp May Road Route because I was missing it and also to check on things. Even though I was too lazy to get a trash bag out of my backpack, I ended up picking up at least a plastic grocery sackful of trash - mostly beverage containers. I managed to stuff the trash in my pants and windbreaker pockets and carried what wouldn't fit.

I saw that thistles were sprouting on the hillside below The Ocean where I pulled out a bunch last year so I worked at pulling out the young ones without gloves because I had left my heavy gloves in the car. I certainly hope I'm destroying invasive thistles and not native ones. They seem to be growing too thickly to be natives.

A big live tree has fallen over the trail on the upper guardrail part. In rerouting around it, I managed to get some nasty splinters from using a stick as a trail clearing tool.

When I got to FR2998, I noticed that the path which the High Altitude Athletic Club Jemez Mountain Trail Runs 50-miler will take up Pajarito Mountain is being marked with orange flagging this year. It's much more visible than the candy-cane-striped flagging they used last year. The track the race follows up Pajarito Mountain connects in perfectly with the Camp May Road Route that I follow. I need to check it out to see how well-cleared it is this year. Last year, even after it was "cleared" for the race, it was still in serious need of a chainsaw. It would be so perfect if some group would adopt the Camp May Road Route, starting from the intersection of West Jemez and Camp May roads all the way up Pajarito Mountain. It provides a safer, more peaceful experience than walking up Camp May Road, with its non-existent shoulders, alongside all the amateur race car drivers aiming to run me over!! Maintaining a trail without a chain saw, though, is getting a little ridiculous even by my low standards.

On the way back down, at the top of Guardrail Hill, I also rerouted a section around two nasty, gnarly widowmakers, one above the other on the same tree, that I have been walking underneath for several years without ever noticing them hanging right over my head.