Cliff dwellings, 121 river crossings, cozy campfires, and miles of adventure in amazing New Mexico!

First crossing in the day, it's too cold for this. Two miles to go till we finish our Hiele adventure in New Mexico. In the final several days of our trip, we found hitting cliffs settlements, practically frozen our feet off crossing a cold river, changed up our camping routine to adjust to the season and lucked out with the best hitchhike of our lives. We started things out by detouring through the Hiele cliff dwellings, which are 750 year old homes built into the sides of cliffs. We noticed that each cliff dwelling was oriented to catch the morning sunrise and heat up quickly on cold days like we were experiencing. Then we headed down into a canyon to resume our walk along the Hiele river. This time we walked a different fork than the first half of our trip, and the water was so cold. Even after warming up in a second hot spring, it was pretty miserable, subjecting our feet to this water. So we changed things up. We stopped early and had a fire two nights in a row. We almost never had fires on our trips, but the warmth really lifted our spirits. Coffee and caffeinated salt stick gave us the energy to modify our plan route and we walked a ridge in the high country above the river. It was really pretty and much warmer. We even enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner right on the edge of the canyon. Eventually we made it out of the wilderness and back to the roof. We hear lots of cars. We planned to hitchhike back to our car, but there was almost no traffic to get a ride with. The ride we finally caught was beyond that big, but that's a story for another video.