4.25.18
Around 11:30 am on the 23rd we stopped next to an old tall Joshua tree with 10 or so great arms and I drew with my foot in the unpaved road: 530, 1/5, 20%. We’d been following the old Los Angeles aqueduct for 5 hours now, leap-frogging our Asian friends during snacks and water breaks along with a quiet younger fellow who smoked in the shade whenever he got a chance and another older Chinese fellow named Charley whose English was just good enough to communicate a few words with a broad smile and a wave each time we passed. The stretch offered no respite from the sun which rose steadily, illuminating a long 1/2 portion of an open canal when our shadows were still long earlier in the morning.
We’d passed the 500 mile mark the day before but 530 was more significant to me. It was a number I could finally wrap my head around. The Asian couple came up behind us as I drew my numbers in the dirt and we explained that this meant the trail was 20% complete. "Ohhh!" and they took pictures of my crude drawing and we laughed that is was only a little over 2,000 more miles to go.
Distances become meaningless after awhile. Topography, sunlight, water intake, food quality, sleep quality, physical condition...all these factor into whether or not you’ll have a good day, a ‘long’ day or an ‘easy’ day. No two days are alike outside the fact that you’re walking quite a bit and by the end of each stretch you’re simply glad to see a flat spot you can call a campground. Its very rare that the reality of 2,650 miles even factors into your perspective. One day at a time.
We’d left Wrightwood in an Uber to bring us back to the trail for a short day up Mt Baden-Powell and back down to Little Jimmy campground. Our driver was a big tattooed guy from LA and the car was wafting cannabis out the windows the whole way. We gave the usual rundown of distance and resupply but the topic quickly turned to the statistical lethality of bears and mountain lions and things that go bump in the night. "Aw hell no!" He’d day after every story. "I mean, usually it’s just lizards and birds you hear in the leaves" I said "but then sometimes late at night you’re sitting around the fire and you just hear this one big ‘crunch’ about 15 feet away in the darkness..." "Oh Hell no! Uh uh!" At the trail we took our packs out of the trunk and he wanted to see how much they weighed. "Aw hell no!!! No way!" He wished us luck and we waved goodbye. Sometimes you’re reminded that what you consider to be a reasonable way to spend a summer is the definition of crazy to someone else...
We climbed Baden-Powell for a few hours. Plenty of other hikers on the trail. It’s the big packs and unshaven unkept look or something. People pass and say ‘good luck guys’ every so often. Another man approached quietly and after some small talk tells us it’s his life goal to do the PCT. I don’t know what to do with this kind of info sometimes. Hanne says "Yeah you should do it!" I say "Yeah it’s more challenging and more amazing at the same time then I ever imagined" but I’m not sure if this sentiment translates well. We snap pictures at the summit and descend to Little Jimmy Campground where numerous campers have already set up in the dusk light under a canopy of giant pines. I start a fire and we cook our new favorite: Marunchan ramen noodles. 2 packs equals 650 or so calories of monosodium glutamate and stock flavor that is simply the most psychologically satisfying thing you can eat after a long cold day of hiking. We add Cholula and hot pepper seeds and then augment with the ‘healthy stuff’ from our resupply bags. We lock our remaining food in a big metal bear safe and fall asleep full and tired.
We wake up and put things into the packs. Mornings are sore. You feel like your feet are 40 years older than the rest of your body. The pads of my feet always swell during the night, sometimes to the point of waking me up. The knees feel spent and it’s a slow process hobbling around the campsite breaking things down, walking far enough away to do your business, coming back, sorting out something for breakfast etc. The first mile is a bit awkward as limbs come to life and already-abused ligaments and tendons warm up. Just as this is getting going a man with a great red beard under a stocking camp is calling his two yellow labs back from down the trail, smiling ear to ear, asking all about the trip, offering whiskey to warm us up (it’s about 35 degrees) and we’re politely nodding and trying our best to be polite and communicative. I can’t believe how incredible people have been on this trail and every day it gets to me. Even if it’s a little forward...you know people are just genuinely curious and I try my best to share all my best stories and give detailed information about my own experience. How I got my trail name. What my favorite town is so far. What’s it really like...I honestly live these interactions but this morning my brain is barely on and it’s freezing and ten minutes later we’ve got to summit Mt Williams just to get the day started. So we climb. And climb. You sweat and sweat but when you stop you’re suddenly soaked in the middle of a wind-chill so you just keep walking.
We come down the other side to cross a paved road and run into another couple trail angels who met on the PCT in 2016, fell in love, married, have a child on the way, and decided to fly in from Luxembourg this year just to give snacks and cold sodas to hikers. I can’t process this level of sincerity sometimes. I see things like this every day now. Random acts of kindness yes, but the whole-hearted dedication from so many people to this adventure is beyond words. Anonymous people spend hundreds of dollars on water caches just to make sure we’re ok in the long stretches without streams or springs. I don’t know who these people are. I just thank them in the log books signed: ‘Campfire’.
Hanne talks with the couple for awhile in German while I talk to Noah from Portland about pants, jobs, and sugar intake for a minute. We thank them over and over for the potato chips and ham slices and cheese and make our way toward another paved detour a few miles down. There’s an endangered frog around here so we’ve got to spend 4-5 miles on a paved road till we meet back up with the trail. I don’t mind. It’s easy on my feet. We kick pine cones back and forth while motorcycles and corvettes zip by every so often out on leisure cruises outside LA. "Do you like cars?" "Ya I guess. I’ve only had a few though." "I like Audis a lot". "I think my dream car is a blue 1967 Mustang fastback GT...maybe a Shelby. Only cuz I’ve had dreams about this car for 6 years now. I don’t know what it means though..."
We pass steep ski lifts dangling in the air. Out of season. White billowing mists form and evaporate on all sides and the pines in seconds and the trees bend and comb huge gusts of wind. We find shelter next to a log and eat lunch on the side of the road before heading further down. The temperature doesn’t let up one degree and we pull up collars and hoods until we reach a scout camp with an outhouse, a bunkhouse, a bench, and a kiosk that offers PCT hikers free post-cards. We sit down and write short thank you notes to family and friends and deposit them in a slot at the kiosk without any idea of when they’ll be sent or if they’ll pay postage for a letter going overseas. This is where we also met Ginger Tiger from Great Britain who has noted, along with us, the astounding number of working outhouses and port-a-jons along this stretch of Angeles National forest. He called them ‘privies’. I said to Hanne: ‘I thought the Brits called them a ‘loo’. "In German you can say Loo-loo" she said. "Hmm." We walked on. Little white rocks lined up showed us mile 400 in 3 official places within a 1/2 mile of each other. The cold was relentless. We finally reached a campsite by a small stream where some of the hikers from Little John had already made camp. Another fire. Another group with Ginger Tiger leading came in 30 minutes later. They too got a fire going. It was cold no doubt, but this was the first time in 400+ miles I’d seen anyone make a fire besides myself. It made me happy and we could hear them laughing and telling jokes into the night next to their warm fire.
Hanne and I sat by our own fire in silence for a long time...slowly remembering interesting things that had happened so far...how our perspectives had changed...but we we found ourselves in hysterics over the sheer amount of strange and hilarious things that had already occurred. Nature, I think, has a sense of humor. Here you are-this bumbling animal trying to find places to eat and sleep and find temporary relief from the elements and suddenly you trip in a pine cone, a bee stings your hip, an ant bites your thigh just before bed, a gust of wind blows your solar panel so hard it flies over your backpack and smacks you in the face...you go to squeeze water through a filter and get a mouthful of everything you tried to filter out the day before...but it’s all punctuated by a sense of raw experience that I’ve never been a part of at this level. It is brutal and beautiful and the same time. It is the epitome of balance as I know it.
The next day I tried trekking poles for the first time. It is now officially a new PCT. Poles essentially give you extra limbs, allowing you to drag yourself up steep inclines and brace yourself on the downhills and water crossings. At the beginning of my preparations I’d been completely adverse to the idea. The idea of carrying anything extra at all sounded cumbersome at best and outside Whitewater Reserve by Cajon Pass I’d given them a five minute try before handing them back...but on this day the rhythm suddenly clicked and I was converted. We wound down through shrubs until we found a spot next to an old industrial side road with broken telephone poles scattered about. It wasn’t pretty but it worked. The next day we’d planned to pass the Acton KOA and get a little closer to Agua Dulce, but after 20 miles the lure of a shower and grass to camp in was too much. We made it to the KOA around 5pm just before their little convenience shop closed and bought sausage links and snacks for dinner and got hot showers and laundry done too. Another couple John and Kris had taken an interest in us about a week back and we saw them pitched across the field and while I got my shower Hanne had a long conversation with them. John is a retired engineer and Kris is a retired science teacher and there aren’t many places they haven’t been to. We’d first met them at the base of the Mojave River before Silverwood Lake and called them "The Howdies" at first because John greeting was invariably "Howdy Howdy!" But as usual, getting to know people unraveled stories and connections previously unthought of. By Tehachapi we’d become regular trail buddies, passing each other routinely throughout the day. We spent a morning in the lobby of the KOA trying to plan the next stretch under a blaring television with Bewitched reruns until a couple ambled in at 10 am on the dot, switched the channel to The Price is Right and turned the TV up 10 decibels, discussing with another fellow what sort of taxes were actually taken out of your winnings. It then became a full-on debate and I realized things were getting surreal...the milk I’d bought smelled expired by a year. The coffee was so watered-down I threw it away. We had to get out of this RV oasis and fast. We threw our things into the packs, checked water levels and headed for the hills toward Agua Dulce. This turned into a beautiful albeit short 8 miler through grassy hills and eventually a sort of county park that labeled various geological and floral features as we went. Great sandstone spires silhouetted against the desert and we strode past farmlands and haystacks with our thumbs out until a woman in a white pickup gave us a ride to Hiker Heaven up the street. Hiker Heaven is private enterprise run by a woman I presume because she gave us the run-down the moment we walked in. Dogs circled and barked passively as we got a brief tour. It looked like a strategic PCT headquarters with rows of resupply boxes, computers flickering with Sierra snow reports, dome shelters, and massive hiker boxes. This is where I found a sturdy pair of aluminum trekking poles for free. Just sitting there. I double checked to make sure they were in working order. Score. Just in time. We knew we could stay at Hiker Heaven if we wanted to. A lot of other hikers we’d already seen had begun to trickle in. But we were keen on Tehachapi and finishing section 1 so we hit a Mexican restaurant, a small market, caught a hitch from a guy with a van to the trail and put on our headlamps to hike about 2 miles in the dark until we found what looked like a decent flat place just off the trail. The wind picked up and smashed our tents every which way for about two hours but then suddenly died completely like someone had flipped a switch. When I woke up I got a view of the valley below and what appeared to be multiple trailers surrounding 1/2 of a Boeing 747 in the middle of a field. The front half to be precise. I shrugged my shoulders and brushed my teeth. Now that I had the poles we set off at a solid pace that didn’t let up for 17 miles. It was hot with some crazy inclines but we pushed through taking short breaks until we came to a little hill with two Austrians at the bottom. They nodded as we approached which is sufficient in hiker-speak to say "Hi. Respect. Too tired to talk." And we moved up to a little clearing above them. The night moved in a magical sort of way. At first we just had dinner and did the usual preparations but I didn’t put the rain fly I my tent so I could see the stars. Hanne lent me her iPod for a moment and I realized it’d been weeks since I’d just listened to any kind of music. I’d cleared my own phone of music hoping to get some sort of perspective on music after years of production, projects, etc but now the music came through in the most innocent way and for the first time in years...I just enjoyed it. We split the phones and spent the rest of the evening listening to Phil Collins just staring at the stars and singing along and it was just perfect. One of those moments you imagine having when you imagine doing this to begin with. I slept deep that night. Realized I was becoming acclimated to everything. Being outdoors. Finding water. Walking all day. Waking up in nature day after day. The trail was starting to sink in and I was beginning to feel more at ease in the wind, dirt, owls, and stars than the towns we passed every week or so. It was just so much more simple out here. Walk, eat, drink, sleep. Repeat. No room for bullshit. No need for it. Just keep going until you reach your campground. Change, amend, and adapt as needed. Just keep moving. Walk three mountain passes, three climate zones, talk to total strangers for any length of time, make new acquaintances daily with no knowledge of the duration of your relationship - only that you’re in this together on some level. That you both decided to do this for whatever reason and now you’re here doing the best you can to sort it out on a daily basis.
We followed the footprints of the Austrians up and down hills until we caught up with them around noon the next day. One of them was so into the local flowers he was leaping across the switchbacks with his camera for miles. I watched this for an hour or so. Running past us. Letting us pass. Over and over. I understood what he was feeling. It’s a sort of energetic rapture I’ve experienced on my own photography expeditions. You feel mesmerized by nature, moving with the light, willing to do almost anything to capture the right moment if it takes 1,000 shots to get it. Eventually we all wound up in some pine trees above the great desert stretch below. The ‘notorious LA aqueduct stretch’. We found a sandy area with hummingbirds buzzing around and a great orange/pink sunset and I tried to eat as much as I could to repair what was cumulative aches in my left hip and knees. It was the shoes honestly...a pair of Nikes that were designed to jog around suburbs on pavement but the cumulative shocks where finally getting to me. I hadn’t had a single blister in almost 500 miles but I had no sole support and needed a change soon. The next morning we headed out over the crest for 10 or so miles before heading straight down toward Hikertown. Straight down. Knees began killing me and by the time we hit 18 miles I was in serious pain. My hip had been tight for a week since the Mojave ridges and I constantly needed to stop and stretch it. The good thing was that since the beginning of the trail I’d become more conscious of exactly what my body needed. Now it needed new shoes. ASAP. The Nike soles were do thing I could feel everything little pebble in every step. It was decided that in Tehachapi I’d find a good pair. First, we had to get to Hikertown and before Hikertown we had to get a hitch to the Neenache Cafe to resupply. The moment our thumbs went out a car stopped and we caught a quick ride in from Hio who was on vacation, taking back routes from St Louis to San Diego. When we stepped in the property gates a low voice behind a cap and a cigarette in the corner told us the diner was closed, but we could still get food from the adjoined market. I didn’t realize he was a hiker just then but thanked him for the info and walked in. Sandwiches, pizza, jerky, Gatorade. We sat at an outdoor table and devoured it. Richard, who ran Hikertown, showed up abd drove us back to the property where we ended up staying that evening. Hikertown is hard to describe...only its wonderfully strange and beyond that a great service to the PCT community. There are free showers, toilets, and charging stations but most notably the property is surrounded by small dorm rooms with single beds all done with exterior facades resembling the Old West. One dorm is the Sheriff’s Office. Another is the School. Another is the Mercantile etc. Here we met up again with John and Kris as well as our Asian couple who we hadn’t seen since a few days before Wrightwood. How they kept this pace was a mystery to us but everyone was in good spirits and preparing for the 19 mile desert stretch the next day. The great challenge with the LA aqueduct stretch is that there just isn’t any shade or shelter. There’s also no water for the entire stretch so you’ve got to fill every bottle you’ve got (which is heavy) In the mountains I’ll barely go through one liter for every ten miles but in the heat it feels like it’s impossible to get enough. Liters disappear in great gulps just to cool the body on top of rehydration. I had 3.6 liters. I knew I could make it. Just had to keep the sun hat on, keep the sleeves down and walk steady. So we started out at 7:30 am and passed a few people. Then we’d stop for water and they’d pass us. Through the canals, over the huge iron waterworks flumes, and over miles of dirt road and cement. At one point I just decided to try walking a mile with my eyes closed and told Hanne to make sure I didn’t walk into a ditch or something. She’d push my shoulder to get me back in course and 25 minutes later that was over...and we kept walking. And walking. Then it was mile 530 where I drew in the sand with my foot. 1/5th done. What does that even mean? It meant something...but we kept walking. Under the massive Windmills to Cottonwood Bridge where we met John and Kris again. They’d left Hikertown at 3 am, walked through the night to beat the heat and hiked up under the bridge until the worst part of the day was over. We were all at 19 miles. Charley, smoker, Asian couple, Jon and Kris, and now Vlado from Slovakia who had decided to take it easy that day. He’d camp at the bridge with smoker. Charley looked like he’d stay too. He was pretty beat. Our Hong-Kong/Taiwan duo would head to the Wind Farm HQ a mile down the road where there was supposed to be a running spigot. They’d probably camp there. John, Kris, Hanne and I decided to do 6 more miles to the end of the wind farm and camp by another seasonal stream. I knew it’d be no problem even at 24 miles because we’d been on flat ground all day, so we wound up through more hills, past more windmills groaning in the light breeze and dipped down into a dark little valley with a perfect site right by the water. We lost John and Kris but figured they just called it a little sooner and camped above. Ramen noodles never tasted so good. The water from the stream was silty and full of algae but I dug down a little to make a shallow pond where we could fill up our bottles for filtering. The next morning we headed over two passes and more windmills straight for Tehachapi. The gateway to the Sierra Nevadas. We caught a ride from a former Doberman Pincher breeder who was driving an old 4-runner like the one I used to have. She broke down into tears talking about her 16 year old dog who’d just passed away and we listened to her and talked for about 20 minutes till she dropped us off. We walked about 1/4 mile to a Best Western and...
Sleep. Showers. Resupply. Post Office. Laundry. Continental Breakfast. New Shoes. Hiking pants. Socks. Calling home. Calling friends. More food. Coffee. Blog. It’s taken me about 4 hours to write about the past week...I’m spent. Who knows how many typos this has. My apologies! Tomorrow we make for Lake Isabella. Then three more to Kennedy Meadows. Then the Sierras. Section 2. Central California. Same length as the "desert" section we just finished-just more like 10-13k ft now. Time for sleep!
Best to all and many thanks for your support!
Will
We’d passed the 500 mile mark the day before but 530 was more significant to me. It was a number I could finally wrap my head around. The Asian couple came up behind us as I drew my numbers in the dirt and we explained that this meant the trail was 20% complete. "Ohhh!" and they took pictures of my crude drawing and we laughed that is was only a little over 2,000 more miles to go.
Distances become meaningless after awhile. Topography, sunlight, water intake, food quality, sleep quality, physical condition...all these factor into whether or not you’ll have a good day, a ‘long’ day or an ‘easy’ day. No two days are alike outside the fact that you’re walking quite a bit and by the end of each stretch you’re simply glad to see a flat spot you can call a campground. Its very rare that the reality of 2,650 miles even factors into your perspective. One day at a time.
We’d left Wrightwood in an Uber to bring us back to the trail for a short day up Mt Baden-Powell and back down to Little Jimmy campground. Our driver was a big tattooed guy from LA and the car was wafting cannabis out the windows the whole way. We gave the usual rundown of distance and resupply but the topic quickly turned to the statistical lethality of bears and mountain lions and things that go bump in the night. "Aw hell no!" He’d day after every story. "I mean, usually it’s just lizards and birds you hear in the leaves" I said "but then sometimes late at night you’re sitting around the fire and you just hear this one big ‘crunch’ about 15 feet away in the darkness..." "Oh Hell no! Uh uh!" At the trail we took our packs out of the trunk and he wanted to see how much they weighed. "Aw hell no!!! No way!" He wished us luck and we waved goodbye. Sometimes you’re reminded that what you consider to be a reasonable way to spend a summer is the definition of crazy to someone else...
We climbed Baden-Powell for a few hours. Plenty of other hikers on the trail. It’s the big packs and unshaven unkept look or something. People pass and say ‘good luck guys’ every so often. Another man approached quietly and after some small talk tells us it’s his life goal to do the PCT. I don’t know what to do with this kind of info sometimes. Hanne says "Yeah you should do it!" I say "Yeah it’s more challenging and more amazing at the same time then I ever imagined" but I’m not sure if this sentiment translates well. We snap pictures at the summit and descend to Little Jimmy Campground where numerous campers have already set up in the dusk light under a canopy of giant pines. I start a fire and we cook our new favorite: Marunchan ramen noodles. 2 packs equals 650 or so calories of monosodium glutamate and stock flavor that is simply the most psychologically satisfying thing you can eat after a long cold day of hiking. We add Cholula and hot pepper seeds and then augment with the ‘healthy stuff’ from our resupply bags. We lock our remaining food in a big metal bear safe and fall asleep full and tired.
We wake up and put things into the packs. Mornings are sore. You feel like your feet are 40 years older than the rest of your body. The pads of my feet always swell during the night, sometimes to the point of waking me up. The knees feel spent and it’s a slow process hobbling around the campsite breaking things down, walking far enough away to do your business, coming back, sorting out something for breakfast etc. The first mile is a bit awkward as limbs come to life and already-abused ligaments and tendons warm up. Just as this is getting going a man with a great red beard under a stocking camp is calling his two yellow labs back from down the trail, smiling ear to ear, asking all about the trip, offering whiskey to warm us up (it’s about 35 degrees) and we’re politely nodding and trying our best to be polite and communicative. I can’t believe how incredible people have been on this trail and every day it gets to me. Even if it’s a little forward...you know people are just genuinely curious and I try my best to share all my best stories and give detailed information about my own experience. How I got my trail name. What my favorite town is so far. What’s it really like...I honestly live these interactions but this morning my brain is barely on and it’s freezing and ten minutes later we’ve got to summit Mt Williams just to get the day started. So we climb. And climb. You sweat and sweat but when you stop you’re suddenly soaked in the middle of a wind-chill so you just keep walking.
We come down the other side to cross a paved road and run into another couple trail angels who met on the PCT in 2016, fell in love, married, have a child on the way, and decided to fly in from Luxembourg this year just to give snacks and cold sodas to hikers. I can’t process this level of sincerity sometimes. I see things like this every day now. Random acts of kindness yes, but the whole-hearted dedication from so many people to this adventure is beyond words. Anonymous people spend hundreds of dollars on water caches just to make sure we’re ok in the long stretches without streams or springs. I don’t know who these people are. I just thank them in the log books signed: ‘Campfire’.
Hanne talks with the couple for awhile in German while I talk to Noah from Portland about pants, jobs, and sugar intake for a minute. We thank them over and over for the potato chips and ham slices and cheese and make our way toward another paved detour a few miles down. There’s an endangered frog around here so we’ve got to spend 4-5 miles on a paved road till we meet back up with the trail. I don’t mind. It’s easy on my feet. We kick pine cones back and forth while motorcycles and corvettes zip by every so often out on leisure cruises outside LA. "Do you like cars?" "Ya I guess. I’ve only had a few though." "I like Audis a lot". "I think my dream car is a blue 1967 Mustang fastback GT...maybe a Shelby. Only cuz I’ve had dreams about this car for 6 years now. I don’t know what it means though..."
We pass steep ski lifts dangling in the air. Out of season. White billowing mists form and evaporate on all sides and the pines in seconds and the trees bend and comb huge gusts of wind. We find shelter next to a log and eat lunch on the side of the road before heading further down. The temperature doesn’t let up one degree and we pull up collars and hoods until we reach a scout camp with an outhouse, a bunkhouse, a bench, and a kiosk that offers PCT hikers free post-cards. We sit down and write short thank you notes to family and friends and deposit them in a slot at the kiosk without any idea of when they’ll be sent or if they’ll pay postage for a letter going overseas. This is where we also met Ginger Tiger from Great Britain who has noted, along with us, the astounding number of working outhouses and port-a-jons along this stretch of Angeles National forest. He called them ‘privies’. I said to Hanne: ‘I thought the Brits called them a ‘loo’. "In German you can say Loo-loo" she said. "Hmm." We walked on. Little white rocks lined up showed us mile 400 in 3 official places within a 1/2 mile of each other. The cold was relentless. We finally reached a campsite by a small stream where some of the hikers from Little John had already made camp. Another fire. Another group with Ginger Tiger leading came in 30 minutes later. They too got a fire going. It was cold no doubt, but this was the first time in 400+ miles I’d seen anyone make a fire besides myself. It made me happy and we could hear them laughing and telling jokes into the night next to their warm fire.
Hanne and I sat by our own fire in silence for a long time...slowly remembering interesting things that had happened so far...how our perspectives had changed...but we we found ourselves in hysterics over the sheer amount of strange and hilarious things that had already occurred. Nature, I think, has a sense of humor. Here you are-this bumbling animal trying to find places to eat and sleep and find temporary relief from the elements and suddenly you trip in a pine cone, a bee stings your hip, an ant bites your thigh just before bed, a gust of wind blows your solar panel so hard it flies over your backpack and smacks you in the face...you go to squeeze water through a filter and get a mouthful of everything you tried to filter out the day before...but it’s all punctuated by a sense of raw experience that I’ve never been a part of at this level. It is brutal and beautiful and the same time. It is the epitome of balance as I know it.
The next day I tried trekking poles for the first time. It is now officially a new PCT. Poles essentially give you extra limbs, allowing you to drag yourself up steep inclines and brace yourself on the downhills and water crossings. At the beginning of my preparations I’d been completely adverse to the idea. The idea of carrying anything extra at all sounded cumbersome at best and outside Whitewater Reserve by Cajon Pass I’d given them a five minute try before handing them back...but on this day the rhythm suddenly clicked and I was converted. We wound down through shrubs until we found a spot next to an old industrial side road with broken telephone poles scattered about. It wasn’t pretty but it worked. The next day we’d planned to pass the Acton KOA and get a little closer to Agua Dulce, but after 20 miles the lure of a shower and grass to camp in was too much. We made it to the KOA around 5pm just before their little convenience shop closed and bought sausage links and snacks for dinner and got hot showers and laundry done too. Another couple John and Kris had taken an interest in us about a week back and we saw them pitched across the field and while I got my shower Hanne had a long conversation with them. John is a retired engineer and Kris is a retired science teacher and there aren’t many places they haven’t been to. We’d first met them at the base of the Mojave River before Silverwood Lake and called them "The Howdies" at first because John greeting was invariably "Howdy Howdy!" But as usual, getting to know people unraveled stories and connections previously unthought of. By Tehachapi we’d become regular trail buddies, passing each other routinely throughout the day. We spent a morning in the lobby of the KOA trying to plan the next stretch under a blaring television with Bewitched reruns until a couple ambled in at 10 am on the dot, switched the channel to The Price is Right and turned the TV up 10 decibels, discussing with another fellow what sort of taxes were actually taken out of your winnings. It then became a full-on debate and I realized things were getting surreal...the milk I’d bought smelled expired by a year. The coffee was so watered-down I threw it away. We had to get out of this RV oasis and fast. We threw our things into the packs, checked water levels and headed for the hills toward Agua Dulce. This turned into a beautiful albeit short 8 miler through grassy hills and eventually a sort of county park that labeled various geological and floral features as we went. Great sandstone spires silhouetted against the desert and we strode past farmlands and haystacks with our thumbs out until a woman in a white pickup gave us a ride to Hiker Heaven up the street. Hiker Heaven is private enterprise run by a woman I presume because she gave us the run-down the moment we walked in. Dogs circled and barked passively as we got a brief tour. It looked like a strategic PCT headquarters with rows of resupply boxes, computers flickering with Sierra snow reports, dome shelters, and massive hiker boxes. This is where I found a sturdy pair of aluminum trekking poles for free. Just sitting there. I double checked to make sure they were in working order. Score. Just in time. We knew we could stay at Hiker Heaven if we wanted to. A lot of other hikers we’d already seen had begun to trickle in. But we were keen on Tehachapi and finishing section 1 so we hit a Mexican restaurant, a small market, caught a hitch from a guy with a van to the trail and put on our headlamps to hike about 2 miles in the dark until we found what looked like a decent flat place just off the trail. The wind picked up and smashed our tents every which way for about two hours but then suddenly died completely like someone had flipped a switch. When I woke up I got a view of the valley below and what appeared to be multiple trailers surrounding 1/2 of a Boeing 747 in the middle of a field. The front half to be precise. I shrugged my shoulders and brushed my teeth. Now that I had the poles we set off at a solid pace that didn’t let up for 17 miles. It was hot with some crazy inclines but we pushed through taking short breaks until we came to a little hill with two Austrians at the bottom. They nodded as we approached which is sufficient in hiker-speak to say "Hi. Respect. Too tired to talk." And we moved up to a little clearing above them. The night moved in a magical sort of way. At first we just had dinner and did the usual preparations but I didn’t put the rain fly I my tent so I could see the stars. Hanne lent me her iPod for a moment and I realized it’d been weeks since I’d just listened to any kind of music. I’d cleared my own phone of music hoping to get some sort of perspective on music after years of production, projects, etc but now the music came through in the most innocent way and for the first time in years...I just enjoyed it. We split the phones and spent the rest of the evening listening to Phil Collins just staring at the stars and singing along and it was just perfect. One of those moments you imagine having when you imagine doing this to begin with. I slept deep that night. Realized I was becoming acclimated to everything. Being outdoors. Finding water. Walking all day. Waking up in nature day after day. The trail was starting to sink in and I was beginning to feel more at ease in the wind, dirt, owls, and stars than the towns we passed every week or so. It was just so much more simple out here. Walk, eat, drink, sleep. Repeat. No room for bullshit. No need for it. Just keep going until you reach your campground. Change, amend, and adapt as needed. Just keep moving. Walk three mountain passes, three climate zones, talk to total strangers for any length of time, make new acquaintances daily with no knowledge of the duration of your relationship - only that you’re in this together on some level. That you both decided to do this for whatever reason and now you’re here doing the best you can to sort it out on a daily basis.
We followed the footprints of the Austrians up and down hills until we caught up with them around noon the next day. One of them was so into the local flowers he was leaping across the switchbacks with his camera for miles. I watched this for an hour or so. Running past us. Letting us pass. Over and over. I understood what he was feeling. It’s a sort of energetic rapture I’ve experienced on my own photography expeditions. You feel mesmerized by nature, moving with the light, willing to do almost anything to capture the right moment if it takes 1,000 shots to get it. Eventually we all wound up in some pine trees above the great desert stretch below. The ‘notorious LA aqueduct stretch’. We found a sandy area with hummingbirds buzzing around and a great orange/pink sunset and I tried to eat as much as I could to repair what was cumulative aches in my left hip and knees. It was the shoes honestly...a pair of Nikes that were designed to jog around suburbs on pavement but the cumulative shocks where finally getting to me. I hadn’t had a single blister in almost 500 miles but I had no sole support and needed a change soon. The next morning we headed out over the crest for 10 or so miles before heading straight down toward Hikertown. Straight down. Knees began killing me and by the time we hit 18 miles I was in serious pain. My hip had been tight for a week since the Mojave ridges and I constantly needed to stop and stretch it. The good thing was that since the beginning of the trail I’d become more conscious of exactly what my body needed. Now it needed new shoes. ASAP. The Nike soles were do thing I could feel everything little pebble in every step. It was decided that in Tehachapi I’d find a good pair. First, we had to get to Hikertown and before Hikertown we had to get a hitch to the Neenache Cafe to resupply. The moment our thumbs went out a car stopped and we caught a quick ride in from Hio who was on vacation, taking back routes from St Louis to San Diego. When we stepped in the property gates a low voice behind a cap and a cigarette in the corner told us the diner was closed, but we could still get food from the adjoined market. I didn’t realize he was a hiker just then but thanked him for the info and walked in. Sandwiches, pizza, jerky, Gatorade. We sat at an outdoor table and devoured it. Richard, who ran Hikertown, showed up abd drove us back to the property where we ended up staying that evening. Hikertown is hard to describe...only its wonderfully strange and beyond that a great service to the PCT community. There are free showers, toilets, and charging stations but most notably the property is surrounded by small dorm rooms with single beds all done with exterior facades resembling the Old West. One dorm is the Sheriff’s Office. Another is the School. Another is the Mercantile etc. Here we met up again with John and Kris as well as our Asian couple who we hadn’t seen since a few days before Wrightwood. How they kept this pace was a mystery to us but everyone was in good spirits and preparing for the 19 mile desert stretch the next day. The great challenge with the LA aqueduct stretch is that there just isn’t any shade or shelter. There’s also no water for the entire stretch so you’ve got to fill every bottle you’ve got (which is heavy) In the mountains I’ll barely go through one liter for every ten miles but in the heat it feels like it’s impossible to get enough. Liters disappear in great gulps just to cool the body on top of rehydration. I had 3.6 liters. I knew I could make it. Just had to keep the sun hat on, keep the sleeves down and walk steady. So we started out at 7:30 am and passed a few people. Then we’d stop for water and they’d pass us. Through the canals, over the huge iron waterworks flumes, and over miles of dirt road and cement. At one point I just decided to try walking a mile with my eyes closed and told Hanne to make sure I didn’t walk into a ditch or something. She’d push my shoulder to get me back in course and 25 minutes later that was over...and we kept walking. And walking. Then it was mile 530 where I drew in the sand with my foot. 1/5th done. What does that even mean? It meant something...but we kept walking. Under the massive Windmills to Cottonwood Bridge where we met John and Kris again. They’d left Hikertown at 3 am, walked through the night to beat the heat and hiked up under the bridge until the worst part of the day was over. We were all at 19 miles. Charley, smoker, Asian couple, Jon and Kris, and now Vlado from Slovakia who had decided to take it easy that day. He’d camp at the bridge with smoker. Charley looked like he’d stay too. He was pretty beat. Our Hong-Kong/Taiwan duo would head to the Wind Farm HQ a mile down the road where there was supposed to be a running spigot. They’d probably camp there. John, Kris, Hanne and I decided to do 6 more miles to the end of the wind farm and camp by another seasonal stream. I knew it’d be no problem even at 24 miles because we’d been on flat ground all day, so we wound up through more hills, past more windmills groaning in the light breeze and dipped down into a dark little valley with a perfect site right by the water. We lost John and Kris but figured they just called it a little sooner and camped above. Ramen noodles never tasted so good. The water from the stream was silty and full of algae but I dug down a little to make a shallow pond where we could fill up our bottles for filtering. The next morning we headed over two passes and more windmills straight for Tehachapi. The gateway to the Sierra Nevadas. We caught a ride from a former Doberman Pincher breeder who was driving an old 4-runner like the one I used to have. She broke down into tears talking about her 16 year old dog who’d just passed away and we listened to her and talked for about 20 minutes till she dropped us off. We walked about 1/4 mile to a Best Western and...
Sleep. Showers. Resupply. Post Office. Laundry. Continental Breakfast. New Shoes. Hiking pants. Socks. Calling home. Calling friends. More food. Coffee. Blog. It’s taken me about 4 hours to write about the past week...I’m spent. Who knows how many typos this has. My apologies! Tomorrow we make for Lake Isabella. Then three more to Kennedy Meadows. Then the Sierras. Section 2. Central California. Same length as the "desert" section we just finished-just more like 10-13k ft now. Time for sleep!
Best to all and many thanks for your support!
Will
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