PCT 2014, Day 23: Mount Baden-Powell

DAY 23

May 17th, Saturday

Almost Mount Baden-Powell to 394.3ish via detour

It took us very little time to reach Mt. Baden-Powell that morning, a summit that rose up above our heads, promising a great view of the surrounding mountains and nearby desert floor. 

The trail emptied into a large parking lot that was full of cars since it was a weekend. Dozens of day-hikers were milling about, lacing up heavy-duty hiking boots, tossing high-tech water bottles into backpacks, and taking selfies next to the trailhead sign. Predictably enough, there was a large group of boy scouts getting ready to summit. Their leaders were shouting orders and safety precautions, warning them about trail junctions, and trying to keep the boys’ attention as they got excited for the hike up the mountain.

The hike is a set of quick switchbacks with a steady slope up a few thousand feet. Zach and I steeled ourselves for the climb, but the weather today was milder than usual, and we had the promise of a spring a bit off-trail about halfway up. We shouldered past the day-hikers and began the ascent.

Walking up the switchbacks was easier than I expected, since we were under the shade of trees the whole time. The day felt pleasant, and we glimpsed the wide desert between the trees, encroaching but not overtaking us. The trees grew thick-trunked and small-limbed the further we climbed, but we still walked in shade.

After a quick detour to Lamel Springs (a square foot hole of water covered in a metal grate), Zach and I returned to the trail. It was hard not to feel smug when we blazed past a day-hiker who was just carrying a water bottle, especially since our packs were bigger than our torsos. 

A couple people stopped us to ask us about the PCT.  One woman was hiking down from the mountain with her teenaged daughter, and when she saw my pack, she exclaimed, “Girl, what have you got in that pack?!”

I laughed. Our packs were much bigger than most other PCT hikers, since our tight budget and our love of sleeping comfort made us carry a bunch of bulky gear. “Well, about half of it is our double sleeping bag, and we have a bunch of food, and—”

“Oh,” she said, the lightbulb going off in her head. “So you’re camping overnight.”

I blinked. Zach tried to keep from laughing. We realized that she thought my massive, 35-pound backpack was a daypack. “Yes,” I said, trying to keep a patronizing tone of out my voice. “We’re hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. It goes from Mexico to Canada.”

The woman had never heard of the trail, even though she was on it, and asked a bunch of questions while her teenage daughter kept interjecting, “Mom, don’t hold them up. Mom, they have to keep going. Mom, stop asking so many questions.” At last, she heeded her daughter’s advice and let us go.

Later, we chatted with two older day-hiking guys, and one of them asked what kind of stove we have.

“A homemade alcohol stove,” Zach said. “It doesn’t work very well.”

“Yikes!” the guy said. “Don’t let a ranger catch you with that! Alcohol stoves are illegal on this trail, you know.”

I gasped. I’m always paranoid about following rules, but I hadn’t heard anything about this. “No, we didn’t know.”

“Yeah, they’re considered uncontrolled fire, and with the drought and all, you’re not allowed to have them. The rangers in some of these forests will check them, and you’ll get a huge fine.”

I began to feel panicked. We couldn’t afford a huge fine, but how were we going to buy a gas canister stove now? Seeing my reaction, the second guy chided the first one, “All right, lay off them, ‘Dad.’ They have to make up their own minds.”

But the idea that we were breaking the law festered in the back of my mind.

As we reached the shoulder of the mountain before it crowned into a bald summit, the trees fell away on either side and we were out in the open except for a huge, thick-trunked, twisted tree. It had two main arms, with bare tops, with evergreen branches stiffly sticking out the sides. It had a sign next to it, identifying it as the “‘Wally’ Waldron Tree,” a bristlecone pine estimated to be 1,500 years old. I stared at it in awe. Its massive roots anchored it to the soil, and I noticed that it was standing on its tiptoes because the ground had eroded out from under it over the centuries. I touched the nearest root with a sense of reverence. The wood felt perfectly smooth, sanded down over the centuries.

The PCT continued down the other side of the mountain’s shoulder, but the spur trail to Mt. Baden-Powell’s summit was only 0.2 miles round-trip. We powered up the steep slope, emerging on a mostly-stone crown cluttered with day-hikers. We dropped our packs and wandered around a bit. Walking without a pack, especially after a steep summit, felt very strange: my body threw all its weight into moving my legs, making me move like a jerky mechanical toy. 

The view of the desert was a bit hazy, but the 360-view was nothing to complain about. Again, I got the sense that the horizon was very high as we looked down at it, with much ground and little sky. This mountain was in good company, surrounded by huge ridges and summits to the east, west, and south. To the north, the side we’d come up, the mountains fell away into foothills before smoothing out into a vast plain, painted with delicate sandy shades of red and pink, scored by straight white lines that indicated highways.

We signed the trail register, then sat in the scarce shade of a bush. A group of about fifty Japanese people were there, with multi-day backpacks and walkie-talkies and a tour guide. We sat among the sea of tourists and short-term backpackers, feeling oddly isolated.

Zach pulled out the bag of Fritos and his new bottle of Tabasco habanero sauce. We rehydrated some refried beans in cold water and began eating the chips. Zach dribbled a bit of Tabasco on every chip he ate.

At that point, we were joined by another PCT hiker: Hand Brake, who I had met at Guffy Campground yesterday. This was his first time meeting Zach. When he heard Zach introduce his name, he asked, “Don’t you have a trail name yet?”

Zach shook his head. We continued eating the Fritos.

Hand Brake looked at Zach for a long time. Finally he blurted out, “How about ‘Tabasco?’”

It’s true that Zach is quite the hot sauce connoisseur, and we had actually discussed taking a trip to Louisiana sometime to visit the Tabasco fields there. “I like it,” I said. Zach nodded noncommittally. Hand Brake, satisfied that he’d contributed, hiked back down the mountain. We never saw him again, although I always found his name in the trail registers. But his work was, in fact, done: from then on, Zach always introduced himself as “Tabasco.” 

Before long, we were headed down the mountain ourselves. We passed the old tree again, then plunged over the opposite side of the ridge, skirting the side of Baden-Powell for a bit, then climbing onto the spine of a neighboring ridge of mountains. On this section of trail the pack of hikers thinned, but there were still a lot of people, namely the people from the Japanese tour group. They often formed long lines on the narrow trail that cut across steep slopes, making us slow our pace considerably until they saw us behind them and let us by. I was really glad I didn’t have to pee at any point during this section— there would have been nowhere to go!

We stopped for a break along a ridge on a nice boulder, and some of the Japanese hikers joined us. They spoke in broken but articulate English, asking us if we were PCT hikers. They said they were doing a series of hikes in California. In July they were going to hike the John Muir Trail in the High Sierra, a trail that coincides with the PCT for most of its 211-mile route. The JMT seemed so far away at that point that I could hardly fathom it. I said that we might see them. Later, Zach told me that we had better be through the High Sierra by July, or we would be woefully behind schedule. But I just couldn’t comprehend that we’d be crossing snowy passes in just a few weeks.

Down the mountain a little ways, we stopped at a spring for water and found a trail angel named Sage handing out mini Snickers. As we snacked, we paused to consider our options for an upcoming detour marked on our map: a chunk of the PCT was closed to protect the habitat of the endangered Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog. There were two options for going around it:

1. The “official detour,” which was significantly longer and apparently not very well maintained.

2. The “old detour,” which was about the same distance as the original PCT, but included four miles of “potentially dangerous road-walking.”

It didn’t take us long to choose option two. Sage said he thought it was a good idea.

We continued down the trail, which delved back toward the highway that we had already crossed twice, Highway 2. At the crossing, we found nice outhouses (they even had toilet paper) as well as a big parking lot packed with day-hikers. As I was studying the map and fire warnings on the bulletin board, a man walked up to me. “Hi, are you a PCT hiker?”

I said I was.

“Great! Would you like some soda or vitamin water?”

His name was Louis, and Zach joined me and we walked over to his car. Not only did he have a cooler full of soda, but a bunch of snacks as well: popcorn chips, cookies, and the most amazing, buttery madeleines that I had ever eaten. Zach and I savored each bite and sip.

We discovered that Louis was training for a hundred-mile trail-running race. Since I can’t even run half a mile, I was deeply impressed. Louis seemed to think it was no big deal compared to what we were doing, and I couldn’t convince him otherwise! But our trip just required perseverance— his required an intense kind of activity that I doubt I’ll ever reach.

We said goodbye to Louis and continued up the trail. We hiked to a picnic area called Eagle’s Roost and snacked, then took to the road for the detour.

We were really glad we chose this detour— the road had a wide shoulder and little traffic, and we later heard horror stories of how poorly-maintained the other alternate trail was. Twilight closed in as we walked along the road, on a steady incline that took us deeper and deeper into evergreen-laden mountains. I reflected that, once again, the “desert” section of trail was much different than I had expected.

It was nearly dark by the time we turned off the road to cut through a paid camping area to hook up with a trail that would lead us back to the PCT. The campground was stuffed to the gills, and as we walked between the sites, I felt like we were a couple of hillbillies who had stumbled into New York City.

Everyone’s tents were huge. Huge. They had five- to six-foot ceilings and alcoves and subdivided rooms and patio spaces and screened kitchen attachments. Each campsite had a huge roaring fire. One site was outfitted with a massive gas grill and a buffet, next to a crowd of people sitting at two picnic tables draped with white cloths, adorned with taper candles, and complemented by glasses of wine.

Zach and I must have looked like vultures eyeing potential leftovers as we walked, softly and dreamily, through the camp. Other hikers would have gone up and “yogied,” that is, asked for food in the nicest way possible. Zach and I, both feeling shy and out of place, simply made use of the outhouses and filled up our water bottles at the pump. There was a place for PCT hikers to camp, but that would mean 10 dollars per person, and that was our budget for an entire town stop. We decided to continue on and look for a place to camp once we rejoined the PCT.

We joined up with Burkhart Trail, which wound through a valley next to a stream that tumbled through the rocky wooded landscape. The trail wasn’t narrow, but a cliff rose up to our left and the ground fell away toward the river on our right, leaving nowhere for us to camp. We hiked onward in the gathering gloom, stumbling over rocks until we finally pulled out our headlamps.

Now we were in deep woods, and it was suddenly and alarmingly pitch black. Our headlamps cast pale circles of light that lit up the reflective PCT emblems, but we walked slowly, listening to the gurgle of water and the rushing of wind in the pines.

We were in bear country now, and walking in the dark next to a water source made my heart start pounding in fear. I thought I was holding my unrealistic fears together until Zach walked a little ways ahead, and I yelled, “Don’t leave me!” and dashed over to his side.

“What’s wrong?” Zach asked, turning around in concern.

I burst into tears. (Yes, I know. I did that so much on trail.) “I’m just really afraid of bears,” I said. I knew I sounded pathetic. I knew that the chances of us getting mauled by a bear was literally about one in a million. But I have a hard time quieting fears when I’m in the dark woods at night. 

“I know,” he said, giving my arm a comforting squeeze. “We just need to find a campsite. Stay close.”

Feeling braver (and a bit silly), I stayed right behind him. We crossed the stream a couple times, finding footing on round rocks over the dark water. As we walked, Zach began singing a song about Smokey Bear, which cheered me up.

At last we came to a crossroads where we couldn’t tell where the trail went, but fortunately it was also a wide open space, flat and covered in pine needles. Relieved, we set up camp and decided to eat cold oatmeal, but I begged Zach to not eat it in the tent (because obviously the bears would maul us to get our oatmeal). We walked about ten yards away and sat on the ground, back to back, and ate the oatmeal. My breath steamed in the light of our headlamps. 

At last we crawled into our tent and I tried to tell myself that the thin piece of plastic would protect us from wild animals. That didn’t work, so I told myself that wild animals wouldn’t bother us. I told myself I would be fine. Then I buried my head under the covers and tried to go to sleep.

~~~

PCT 2014, Day 22: Wrightwood, the Friendliest Trail Town

         DAY 22

May 16th, Friday

Guffy Campground to almost Mount Baden-Powell

I floated to the surface of consciousness, feeling deliciously warm and snug and sleepy, to hear calm, zen-like music playing in the background. In my half-asleep state I thought it was a guitar, although later I learned it was a steel drum which a hiker was lugging along with him. Since we were at a backcountry camp, several dozen hikers were already camped there. However, we were exhausted, and so I drifted back to sleep, though the hypnotic music continued to lilt in my dreams.

We woke up for real a few hours later, when all but one of the hikers had packed up and continued on. We crawled out of the tent to find Guffy Campground to be a rather grungy and beat-up place, thanks to lots of careless day-users and overnighters who had no idea how to Leave No Trace. Bits of trash littered the ground. The fire pits were choked with half-burnt candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and bits of chips and Cheetos were strewn across the picnic tables, marked with black rings where people had left camp stoves for too long.

Besides the human elements, the setting was beautiful: we were high in the mountains again, with great views peeking out from the towering firs. I started packing up while Zach went looking for water. We literally had nothing we could eat without water.

I chatted with an older hiker, named Hand Brake, then busied myself getting food ready. Zach returned much later, panting and soaked in sweat. He had found the water source: a tiny spring located in the side of the mountain down a very steep quarter-mile slope. We cooked pasta and ate a breakfast of kings.

It was noon before we set out, and we knew it wasn’t going to be a high-mileage day anyway because we had to stop in Wrightwood, five miles off-trail, to resupply. The trail wound around for a while before coming to a mountain road, paved but relatively deserted, near a rest area. Zach and I took off our packs and waited for a car to drive by. 

It was about half an hour (but only three cars) later that someone stopped to pick us up. He said he was only going partway, but we figured that getting closer was better than nothing. He was a cyclist, and was going a couple miles down the road to see the grand conclusion of the Tour de California, a bicycle race.

It didn’t take us long to see what he was talking about— in a couple miles, the road was choked with tourists and out-of-state cars, along with blocked roads and informational booths. The guy dropped Zach and I off, and then we looked in vain for a place to hitch. We looked distinctly out of place with our backpacks and grungy clothes, and since almost nobody there was a local, they had no idea who we were. 

We stood on the shoulder and awkwardly attempted to hitch for a little while, but the drivers gave us terrified glances as they sped by. At last, in despair, we decided we’d just walk the remaining two miles to town.

We walked for about half a mile, leaving most of the hustle and bustle of the race behind us. I stuck out my thumb for the cars that were passing, and at last a woman pulled over. She owned one of the hotels in town, and apologized that it had been so hard for us to find a ride.

She gave us a quick rundown of the amenities in Wrightwood as she drove us into the ski-lodge community, marked by quaint houses and local shops. Then she dropped us at the post office and wished us luck.

The moment we walked in the post office, the employee behind the desk said, “Welcome to Wrightwood, PCT hikers!” and smiled as if we were the greatest people to ever walk in the door. “Be sure to sign the register next door at the hardware store. We have a list of trail angels there, as well as information about the restaurants, hotels, and groceries. Hiker box is there, too. Do you have a box here?”

Soon we had our resupply box, and we dissected it in a corner of the post office parking lot. We strewed the food everywhere, sorting and categorizing it. As we were sitting on the asphalt doing this, a police officer drove up. We both stiffened a little, already forming our apologies for throwing our junk all over a public parking lot. But the officer, seeing us as he got out of our car, gave us a cheerful smile. “Welcome to Wrightwood! Have you guys signed the trail register yet?”

Taken aback, we stuttered, “No,” and continued sorting our food. It was definitely the friendliest trail town we’d been to yet!

Mountain Hardware featured a staff who was no less friendly. Zach bought some alcohol for our stove. I signed the trail register and looked at who was ahead of us. I flipped through an informational folder they’d compiled, which included a list of trail angels in town, a list of all the amenities, and a copy of the description of Wrightwood from Yogi’s PCT guide. 

The list of trail angels was confusing— it wasn’t clear whether they were all offering places to stay, or just rides back to the trail. Some of them seemed to be asking for money. Zach and I decided to stick with our original idea of returning to the trail today.

I dumped four extra meals into the hiker box— it was simply too much work to cook our food with our sputtering alcohol stove. A hiker with a young face and a mass of curly red hair stared at my leftovers. “You don’t want these?” he asked in disbelief.

“We have more than enough,” I said. “Here— powdered hummus, beefy vegetable soup, mashed potatoes, and two pasta meals.”

“Sweet!” he said, scooping them up.

“I’m Leftovers.”

“Red Bandit,” he said, nodding his head in greeting.

We didn’t see him again until 1,675 miles later, and when we did, we didn’t remember him. But he remembered us.

In the meantime, we had plenty of time to relax. We headed over to Jensen’s Finest Foods and bought some supplies, including a bag of Fritos (quickly becoming our favorite snack— so much salt and fat!) and a tiny bottle of Tabasco habanero sauce (Zach had left behind his heavy bottle of ghost pepper sauce and dearly missed it). Our splurge item of the day was a box of generic cinnamon toast crunch and a quart of milk. We then proceeded to consume both in a single sitting, outside at a picnic table under an umbrella. 

I talked on the phone for several hours, but there was just not enough time to catch up with everyone. When I was on my last call, a local guy walked up to Zach and said, “Do you need a ride back to the trail?”

Zach, once again taken aback by the straightforward friendliness, stuttered, “Oh, uh, yes! Let me just get my things together.”

“No rush,” the guy said. “My name is Paul. I just live a couple blocks away. Here’s my number, and whenever you and your lady are ready to go back up, just give me a call.” With a smile, he returned to his truck and drove away.

Once I got off the phone, I burst into laughter. “What is wrong with these people?” I asked. “They’re so friendly!”

We lounged around for a while longer, then called Paul, who promptly picked us up and drove us back to the trailhead. He helped with search and rescue in the area. We asked him about Wrightwood’s friendliness, and he smiled. “We try,” he said. “We love PCT hikers, and they’re good for our economy. So we try to make them feel as welcome as possible.”

Smog!

From Highway 2, the trail was pretty flat, although it cut through steep alpine scenery cloaked in firs. We saw warning signs for bears in the area, something I didn’t expect in the “desert” section. In the distance, we saw LA’s smog.

We paused at the Grassy Hollow Visitor’s Center, which was closed but had a pump with potable water for the hikers. We pumped it into our bottles and took a drink— and the sharp taste of iron nearly knocked us over. Filtering it did nothing to remove the taste, and all the rest of the evening, I kept on thinking I had blood in my mouth because of the aftertaste. Oddly enough, this was hands-down the worst water we got on trail. We filled up, since we had no choice, and continued on.

Once again, we found ourselves racing against the sun. The solstice couldn’t come fast enough! In the gathering gloom, Zach checked out different semi-flat spots along the trail, but we couldn’t find anything flat enough.

At last, when the sky was lavender with twilight, the scenery flattened out and we found a nice stretch of pine needles under trees, with several hikers camped to the right of the trail. We took a slightly slanted spot to the left, set up camp, and ate some garlic bread we had bought in town. It was covered with a thick coat of margarine and we couldn’t finish it, so we packed our garbage with our food and left it several feet from our tent, now that we were paranoid about bears. Then we crawled into our tent, and Zach opened the Kindle to read Lord of the Rings to me. King Théoden died. I wept.

~~~

PCT 2014, Day 21: Thirst

DAY 21

MAY 15th, Thursday

342ish to Guffy Campground

We both woke up extremely well-rested— which was odd, considering that we’d slept right next to an interstate. Even though it was only 7:00am, the sun already seemed impossibly high in the sky, a reminder that we were hastening toward the solstice. We laid in our tent for a moment, listening to a truck weigh station about a hundred yards away yelling at the semis that they were too heavily loaded. Then we rolled out of the tent and began packing up.

That’s when we saw a set of railroad tracks. About twenty yards from our tent. That explained the noise last night— we had been camped literally right next to an active railway! Still, we had both slept great, and couldn’t complain.

Our packs were weighed down to the point of exhaustion, due to a huge stretch without water that had begun at the McDonald’s and would end at Guffy Campground, over 22 miles away. And the sun was already promising a sweltering day.

Fortunately for us, we found a water cache a couple miles from our campsite. As usual, a group of hikers was gathered around, filling up. The water was limited, so we only topped off our bottles, then continued.

Immediately afterward, we hit an uphill climb. It wasn’t necessarily that steep (although it felt so at the time), but it felt never-ending, taking us up into the mountains through a merciless shadeless patch. We had a lovely view of the railroad tracks and massive boulders rising up next to us, but Zach and I struggled through it, and began sweating like hogs. We took our water in tiny sips, but our mouths felt parched all the time. At last we reached a point where the trail left the barren rocks and cut along the side of the mountains through scrubby desert trees.

Here, in the dappled shade, we stopped to take a break. I sucked on the Camelbak and realized it was dry. We took stock of our water.

Two liters. And we were still ten difficult, dry miles from the nearest water source.

“Oh boy,” I muttered.

Our only option was to sit down and try to wait for the heat of the day to pass, which would mean several hours of idle time. I found cell phone reception and called my mom. I made the mistake of telling her that we were nearly out of water, and she was worried that we’d die of dehydration like the kid we’d heard about on the first day. I tried to reassure her, but my mouth was so dry that talking was painful.

After about an hour, another hiker caught up to us. His name was Neil, and we’d met him a few different places along the way. With tousled brown hair, a perpetual smile, and the brightest twinkling eyes I’ve ever seen, he seemed in a constant state of cheerfulness and goodwill. He was dripping with sweat, glistening and grinning. He stopped to chat with us, and naturally asked us about water.

We told him we only had two liters, and he gasped. “For both of you?!”

“Yeah…”

He paused only a split second. “Here, I can give you a liter. But promise me that you’ll wait for the heat of the day to pass before you go on. Don’t want you guys getting helicoptered out of here!”

We thanked him profusely and dumped one of his water bottles into ours. He wished us luck and continued on.

After a little while, we realized that the Camelbak wasn’t dry— it just had a kink in the hose. It didn’t have much in it, about half a liter, but we were feeling more confident now and the heat of the day had passed. Armed with three and a half liters, we continued on.

We were both pretty hungry, but all we could eat was candy bars because all our food required water to eat. I knew that if we ever hiked in the desert again, we would pack ourselves more snacks that didn’t require rehydration, no matter how heavy they were!

The sun was dipping toward the mountaintops as we raced along, trying to avoid night-hiking as much as possible. There was nowhere to camp even if we had wanted to: the trail cut through vast steep slopes of scree. 

(“Scree” is a word that means “a mass of small loose stones that form or cover a slope on a mountain.” However, the word also sounds like, “kree,” which is what the Goa’uld always yell at the Jaffa in Stargate: SG-1, one of my favorite shows. By this point, every time I saw a scree field, I’d exclaim, “Jaffa, scree!” in Apophis’s voice, and giggle. If you are a Stargate fan as well, you may start muttering “Jaffa, scree!” to yourself every time I talk about scree fields hereafter. It was one of those little inside jokes with myself that kept me sane on the hard days.)

The sun was set, and we walked in twilight for a while before switching on our headlamps. The scree fields gave way to pine trees. There were a couple places to camp, but now we were determined to get to the water, because, after eating our last two Snickers bars, we had almost no food left that we could eat without water. My legs felt like jello but I forced myself to keep going. Zach and I were both breathless, exhausted, and silently grumpy.

I glanced down and, in the circle of light from my headlamp, saw a scorpion. Excited, I yelled at Zach to stop, and he rushed over to see it with me. We were both in awe of this little creature that we’d never seen before. It made me happy that, even though we were exhausted, we could still appreciate the little things.

We passed a trail junction that signaled to us we were almost to Guffy Campground, a backcountry site where we could camp for free. The trail turned murderously steep, but we slogged on determinedly. I’ve always been bad at pushing my body to do things it doesn’t want to do, but I managed. In my memory that last bit of trail is a dark blur.

Then, just like that, we were at the campground. I began setting up our tent and pads while Zach searched for water. He searched far and wide but turned up nothing. We did an inventory and saw that we still had a liter left. It was good enough. We crawled into our tent, used some of our precious water to soak our cold oatmeal, then ate it like we’d never eaten before. Still armed with half a liter for nighttime hydration, we fell into a deep sleep. We’d find the water tomorrow.

~~~

PCT 2014, Day 20: McDonalds!

DAY 20

May 14th, Wednesday

Silverwood Lake to 342ish

We woke up late the next morning, and Grandpa Ed made us breakfast: two eggs, two strips of bacon, and two pieces of toast for each of us. We devoured them almost instantaneously, then raided the fridge to consume the leftover pizza from our restaurant visit the night before. 

We spent the morning chatting with him, and he told us stories of his Walden-like adventures in Canada. He moved there when he was a young man to homestead. After obtaining a miner’s permit to search for gold, he staked a claim near a river ten miles from the nearest tiny town, and proceeded to build a cabin, hunt and forage for food, and live off the land through a cold Canadian winter. He built a buckstove and burned green cottonwood in it, since he didn’t have enough time to season the firewood. Eventually the pitch built up in the chimney pipe and caught his roof on fire. He was barely able to save the cabin.

His talk lighted Zach’s and my minds with thoughts of homesteading and living off the land. Granted, his description of how to gut a squirrel was a bit off-putting, but there was something delightfully romantic about it all. 

After that, we looked through some photos, some of ours and some of his when he and Sande were visiting King’s Canyon, where Zach and I would be headed in a few weeks. The picturesque photos of the mountains seemed so far away from the desert we’d been hiking through.

Around noon, he drove us back down the tortuous roads, dropping us at the shoulder where he’d picked us up. We snapped a photo with him, waved goodbye, and continued on the trail right where we’d left off.

The landscape that day seemed downright boring to me for the most part, although later, when I saw the one photo I snapped of that whole section, I wondered why I didn’t take more pictures of this beautiful landscape! It was a tapestry of small but rugged green mountains, and we followed the spine of a ridge and looked off to the left to see a cliff that disintegrated into giant pillars and rifts of sandstone.

We could see the interstate, Highway 15, in the distance, sometimes to the left, sometimes in front of us. The semi trucks looked like toys zipping along a tiny thread of road, their noise not reaching us up on the breeze-blown hills.

My diary records that I had a huge meltdown, and a conversation ensued. However, I have no memory of it. Meltdowns became so commonplace later on in the trail that I can’t remember which was which.

It was still mid-afternoon when we paused by a sign with arrows that read: McDONALDS .4

I was surprised— I knew about this McDonald’s, having seen photos of hikers with twenty Happy Meals, but for some reason, I had imagined the McDonald’s somewhere in the forest, not the desert. Zach and I had a little debate, and I worried about spending too much money that wasn’t in our budget. Fortunately, Zach put his foot down. “We have to enjoy ourselves sometimes,” he said. “We can’t skip one of the most iconic places on the trail over a few bucks.”

I knew he was right in my head, but I still felt upset and stressed about money (this would become a more and more common theme as the trail went on). Still, we took the little detour toward the McD’s in search of cheap junk food.

"We've made it this far!"

We saw a lot of hikers leaving as we were coming up, including Thistle and Ouzel, who we stopped and chatted with. Then we stepped into the air-conditioned bliss of a fast-food restaurant, set our backpacks in a booth, waved hello to the half-dozen other hikers there, then went to drool over the dollar menu.

We each bought three dollar-menu burgers, thinking that was a reasonable start. (We had heard horror stories of hikers eating ten burgers and packing out ten more, then making themselves sick and barely being able to hobble along.) After we devoured the burgers, I returned to the desk to buy a McFlurry. As I stood behind a normal (non-hiker) customer, I overheard the following exchange.

The customer sniffed the air, then wrinkled his nose and asked, “What’s that awful smell?”

The clerk, speaking in the lowest voice he could manage, murmured, “Hikers.”

“WHAT?” the customer all but yelled.

“Hikers,” the clerk said a bit louder, glancing at me uncomfortably.

“HUH?”

“Hikers!” I exclaimed from behind him, raising my arms in a jubilant display of carelessness and horrendous body odor (yes, I’d showered the night before— but a day of sweating nixed its helpful effects). 

The customer, looking more confused than ever, backed off.

Zach went to the gas station next door and bought some headphones so he and I could take turns listening to music. It was an important purchase, one that did a lot to curb the boredom that was overtaking us at a rapid pace.

We stalled at the McDonald’s for a few hours. I called home. I cried a little bit. I felt stressed about where we would camp for the night, since we were at a highway crossing tucked between steep hills. At last, in the darkness after sunset, when only a faint purple glow showed that the sun had been up, we returned to the trail.

We were very happy to have two headlamps now, but they didn’t make much of a dent in the overwhelming darkness. Despite the massive highway rushing by, there was very little light.

A tunnel from earlier in the day. The
 scary tunnel was much bigger.

We passed through a tunnel underneath the highway. The small scope of light that my headlamp cast, coupled with the roar of the trucks and cars overhead, made me dizzy and a bit frightened. We heard a train roar by. I was battered by irrational fears that we would be attacked by an axe-murderer. (Oddly enough, this was the only time on trail that this particular fear came into my mind.)

We emerged from under the highway and squinted at the sandy trail that wound between prickly bushes and cacti. The trail blazes, mounted on flat fiberglass posts, glowed in our headlamps. We picked our way through a grove of trees and back into the desert landscape. Dimly ahead, we could see hills rising up. Camping might be sparse soon.

Despite being only a hundred yards from the highway, Zach and I decided that we should just camp here. We found a flat spot that didn’t have too many rocks or thorns, and carefully set up camp, trying not to jab our inflatable pads into any of the prickly plants around.

We huddled in our tent, exhausted, but determined to wake up early and get in more miles the next day.

As I was going to sleep, I heard a noise like a jet-plane, rushing closer and closer. The sound roared over us like thunder, all around us, as if a ghostly freight train had rushed through our tent. My ears were ringing afterward. But Zach and I were so tired that we just went to sleep anyway.

Our ghostly jet-plane-thunder-freight-train noise visited us frequently that night. But it, like other white noise, barely brought me to the surface of consciousness, and I soon went back to sleep.

In the middle of the night, though, Zach urgently shook me out of a dead sleep. He was half-sitting up on his pad, staring at me with wild eyes.

“Huh? What is it?” I asked.

“The snakes,” he said in a breathless, not-quite-slurred voice. “They’re going over the tent.” He made a sweeping motion from one side of the tent to the other with his finger. “The snakes… over the tent…”

I had seen him in this state before, where his body was awake but his mind was still dreaming. “There aren’t any snakes,” I said as soothingly as I could. “You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep.”

“No,” he said in a hushed tone, clearly upset that I wasn’t heeding his warning. “The snakes… they’re going over… they’re going over…”

“Shh. Go to sleep.”

Zach stared intently at the ceiling of our tent, his eyes flicking back and forth at the invisible snakes. Then he sunk back onto his pad and started snoring.

~~~