​In the early hours of morning I hear Kate's alarm on her phone go off.  I know it went off, but all I want to do in the morning cold/darkness of winter is curl up in my quilt and keep on sleeping.  But, I know we need to move because today could involve some route-finding that might eat up some hours.  So, it is time to move.  Winter means dark mornings and today was no exception.  I roll around in my quilt before I find the onus to get up and get moving in the dark.  It certainly isn't as cold as yesterday morning.  The desert morning brings soft, diffuse light that brightens pinkly on the craggy hillsides around us.  Alamo Lake appears in the distance.  All the bikes are packed and we pedal over to the side of the little general store to fill our waters from the outside hose spigot.  

​Last night was the cold call of winter desert.  The wash, rich with atmospheric moisture along the Santa Maria River, saturated our shelters with condensation that iced a quarter thick both interiorly and exteriorly.  I wake up to pee in the night and felt the top of my head scrape crystals from the inner walls.  With dawn's cusp, we stagger into the diffuse light.  Janna and I's bikes are caked in a quarter inch layer of soup frost - probably the thickest I've ever seen outside the Sierra Nevada.  The frost is copious.  It's probably somewhere in the mid-teens temperature-wise so we're all moving around slowly trying to keep fingers warm while simultaneously performing camp tasks.  No one is too excited for the prospect of morning water crossings down the wash in these conditions.

January is always the middle of winter here on the South Rim.  And the craving for desert warmth and escape always hits true.  When Janna and I were looking ahead to the MLK, Jr. holiday weekend, we decided to travel with Dan and Kate, who were scheduled for furlough and were going to be down in Arizona from Glacier NP at that time.  The four of us wanted to catch up, and we felt a bikepacking trip through the desert deserved merit for an adventure all together.  At first, we were looking at creating a route through Gold Butte NM, but we all felt a closer, warmer, and shorter route would be preferable since none of us had ridden much due to winter.  At the beginning of December, Kurt Refsnider published his Tres Rios Loop.