Wednesday, March 14th (McKenna)

 My favorite time to start any hike is before dawn. We arrived at the Coronado Memorial Overlook Trailhead just as the stars began to fade. We forced ourselves to eat some muffins and bananas despite the urge to vomit instead.

My incredibly supportive and loving boyfriend, hereto referred to as Wild Man, had driven Heidi and I down to Sierra Vista and would hike his second trip down to the border with us. I say "down" because it's a 500ft elevation loss over 1.5 miles just to reach the starting point on the AZT. Wild Man had hiked the full AZT by himself in 2015. He'd warned us of the rough day ahead, but schwoo-eee! We were in for it.

At the bottom of the United States of America, we took the obligatory oblisk photo.

 And then we climbed. And climbed. And climbed.

We did take a few breaks...

And that was the last of my pictures for the day because we just had to put one foot in front of the other. At the top of the sky, we ran out of land to climb and we went down for a bit until we reached a spring piped into a cast iron bathtub.

I'd love to say we then set up camp and rested, because that IS where we camped, but instead, I took us on an unintentional side trip. Only an additional .5 miles, but Heidi wasn't happy about it, lol! We learned to check the GPS at every non-marked junction.

We made it back, set up camp, built a small fire and worried we would burn the whole mountain down with the wind.

Eventually we got to bed. At 10pm, we woke to what we thought was a Border Patrol helicopter hovering overhead. They kept their spotlight on our tent for a while and kept coming back, checking the mountainside. We learned later that it was actually Search and Rescue looking for a lost hiker. They found him, but because of the wind, they could only throw down some gear for the night to him. He made it out the next day.

Glad it wasn't us, and it also made us feel SO tough. We made our first major climb with success!!