In the morning Doaf and I
cooked our respective breakfasts on our camping stoves on the table of the
hotel room, which I imagined made the place look like a meth lab, although I’m
not exactly sure how one looks.
We walked
down to the hiker supply store and I bought a bag for storing clothes that had
a fuzzy side and doubled as a pillow, a pair of socks with toes to wear with my
sandals in camp, and a bandanna for filtering nasty stream water should the
occasion arise, as my bandanna previously designated for that had been
requisitioned as a snot rag.
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| We passed this sign on the way to the store - I can only imagine what prompted it's posting. |
The proprietor of the store was friendly,
took our names down on his register[i],
and asked to take our pictures outside.
The store was full of great things for hikers, and I was enjoying myself
until Doaf mentioned a large pile of food that he had seen abandoned on the
trail between Campo and Lake Moreno his first day hiking.
“Well,” the store owner said,
“I just hope some hiker got to it before one of those illegal Mexicans.”
I was stunned, wondering how
someone desperate enough to risk their lives illegally crossing an
international border could possibly need calories less than someone with the
disposable income necessary to spend five months walking from Mexico to Canada for self-fulfillment. Was I just being naïve? I remembered trail angel Bob telling me that
a recent law imposing a 90-day detention for anyone caught twice was a real
deterrent because it was 90 days that they couldn’t be working and sending
money home to their families, which reinforced my liberal assumption that
illegal immigrants are people who just want to work, often at jobs that
Americans don’t want anyways. At any
rate, I didn’t say anything, I just went outside and smiled for my
picture.
I told Doaf to go ahead,
wanting a little time alone. I enjoyed
hiking with him a lot, but I wanted this to stay mainly a solo trip. We agreed to say goodbye at the post office
at noon, where I had a small package to pick up and another hiker that Doaf
planned to leave with had one to pick up as well. When I arrived a small crowd of hikers had
gathered on the porch, and I felt a sudden, almost physical urge to go with
them. I was thrilled to have this feeling,
but two things held me back. One was the
desire to be alone for awhile and to keep my hike my own, and the other was the
desire to sit down and write before the impressions in my head slipped away.
 |
| Saying goodbye to Doaf |
I picked up my resupply boxes and sat on the
porch sorting through things to mail home, chatting with the first other solo
female hiker that I’d met. Shannon was a petit blond with a lilting, childlike voice
and an aura of cheerfulness. She
understood wanting to hike alone, her eyes widening when I mentioned it in the
way that people do when you voice something that they’ve already been thinking
but have not yet articulated themselves.
She was a vegan and I wondered how she could possibly survive hiking
that way, but she seemed pretty happy on that porch eating her peanut butter
and banana. We said a friendly goodbye
and I walked out of town to find a secluded spot.
I walked four miles to a
lookout point near a campground, stubbornly carrying the six beers that Doaf
and I hadn’t finished and thinking about the big difference made by just a
small amount of weight and how it made my legs feel. At the place I planned to stop, a day hiker
waited with a huge black and white dog while his friends fetched water. I asked if I could pet the dog, and Gil told
me how he had once hiked a section of the PCT with llamas. I excused myself to go and find a spot to eat
and write, and moved in to shake his hand.
Instead of taking my hand, he grabbed the side of my pack and yanked on
a strap. Suddenly, everything felt
different.
“What did you do?!?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, “I
didn’t mean to –”
“Do the other side!” I
practically shouted. I rotated myself
and he yanked another strap. My pack
literally felt 10 pounds lighter. Gil
began to explain additional adjustments that I could make the next time I took
the pack off, but I was already shedding it for a demonstration. He adjusted the rest of the straps, and then
instructed me in how to cinch the pack on correctly, explaining that he’d once
taken a class on the subject. I hadn’t
realized the degree to which my pack had been pulling me backwards, and I
suddenly felt as if I could literally jog the trail.
 |
| Gil and Jerry |
I thanked Gil profusely, found
a secluded spot, and wrote in my journal for hours, leaving only when darkness
fell. Hiking in the dark was completely
different, and I sipped my few remaining beers rather than guzzling water as I
had during the day. I noticed an
abundance of insects on the trail, which I hadn’t during the day, and a few
frogs as well. I’ve always been afraid
of the dark and I felt jumpy on and off, stopping and listening to noises that
startled me, but overall I remained fairly calm and was proud of myself for
doing something that most people would probably not even consider an
accomplishment.
 |
| I got into photographing creepy looking trees in the dark. |
I hiked five miles to the
Pioneer Mail Campground, where at least four other hikers were camped. I set up my tent in the dark to the sounds of
the nearest hiker grunting and farting in his tent, burned a package of Kraft
macaroni and cheese to the bottom of my Jetboil, and crawled into my tent to
sleep. In the morning my loud neighbor
and another hiker left early, leaving me, Shannon, and a young hiker named
Andrew whom I had also met at the store in Mt. Laguna. The water report[ii]
had said that Pioneer Mail had a faucet running, but it was dry and the only
water was in a concrete trough labeled for horses. Dead insects floated on the surface, and
algae grew below.
No one else would
touch it, but I was out of water and the water source was at the Sunrise
Trailhead seven miles out. I remembered
Gio’s instructions:
“One drop of bleach per liter,
two if it’s nasty, and you can strain it through a bandanna first if it’s
really bad.” I decided that this
qualified as really bad. I cut out two
small sections of my bandanna, covered my two Smart Water bottles with them and
secured them with rubber bands, and submerged the bottles, squeezing the air
out of them and letting them fill with water through the cloth.
I dumped three liters of the
bandanna-filtered water into my platypus bladder, added six drops of bleach, and
waited the requisite thirty minutes before tasting it. It tasted just like municipal tap water.
I was the last one out of the
campground and spent the day hiking alone. The trail began to open up into the first really grandiose views, and I stopped to take more landscape photos than anyone needs.
At one point I came upon memorials to a number of people, who I would later learn were hang gliders. I still don't understand if they all died hang gliding from that spot, or if not why the memorials are all located there:
At one point I passed Shannon, who had stopped to wrap her blistered
feet, and then at the Sunrise Trailhead water tank she caught up with me
again.
 |
| The always cheerful Shannon |
 |
| I loved this hat, and whoever Carmen is, I hope she found her way back to it. |
Shannon was interested in my night
hike, and decided to spend the afternoon relaxing and letting her blisters rest
before trying it herself. She listed the
homeopathic remedies she had for the blisters, a number of natural salves and
oils, before making an astute observation:
“I’m just wondering, if I
wasn’t carrying all of this stuff – maybe I wouldn’t need it.”
We said goodbye again and I
hiked on to the Rodriguez Spur Truck Trail, which had a large water tank.
 |
| It's fun to watch the birds floating on the currents. |
 |
| I almost stepped on this snake before I saw it and made a wide circle around it, but I've showed this photo to people and apparently it's harmless. |
 |
| My hiking sillhouette |
 |
| The cacti are beginning to bloom. |
At the Rodriguez Spur I caught up with Andrew. He was just leaving but told me where he
planned to camp at a site around mile 72, and we agreed that I would hike to
there too and camp with him. I hiked the
last stretch in the dark, guided by his headlight shining from up on a
ridge. Andrew was a tall, lanky kid of 21,
taking some time off of college. We
talked gear, and found that we were jealous of each other – he envied my light
pack, and I envied his ability to make us quinoa and bean tacos. (My Jetboil burned so hot that it was
basically only good for boiling water to reheat instant food.) He envied my light pack, and I envied his
gigantic bag of spices. (I slathered my
tacos with his yellow curry powder.) He
envied my light pack, and I envied his ability to charge his cell phone with a
solar panel while he hiked. (My small,
light auxiliary battery gives about an extra 24 hours of life to the phone when
it’s used for both a camera and a navigational device.)
In the morning we talked about
taking time off of school, which I support fully, having dropped out of college
twice myself, returning to finish and take a masters only after something
outside of school really inspired me. I
tried to give him what I feel is the most important piece of advice, which is
to think about how you want to spent your day physically when you choose your
major. I told him about my friend Gloria
in Coos Bay who majored in forestry because it
meant she could hike in the woods every day, and who is one of the happiest
people I have ever known. I don’t know
if any of it sunk in, but it’s something that I never considered before I spent
years training to do something that would put me behind a computer for the rest
of my life. I honestly don’t regret my
education, I’ve never achieved the way I did in that academic setting, but I do
envy my sister using her masters’ degree as an occupational therapist without
ever sitting down. In fact, I don’t even
think that my sister has a desk… Andrew
and I went on to speak of our families and of some very personal things, and
then he left me to finish packing up, promising to wait at the water cache at
Scissors Crossing, to say goodbye before I got off the trail to hitchhike into
Julian.
The hike to Scissors Crossing
was uneventful until I ran out of water, realizing that while three liters was
plenty for ten miles straight, it was not enough for ten miles that included an
overnight stop in a dry camp. I had run
out of water the day before on the way to into the Rodriguez Spur Truck Trail,
but had walked without water exactly two miles downhill in the shade. Today I ran out in direct sunlight, with at
least three miles to go. The last two
miles were completely flat, and it was difficult to follow the trail. At some point I lost it, following the
footprints of other hikers who had apparently lost it too. Upon realizing that I was lost I pulled out
my iPhone, took it out of airplane mode, opened the Guthook’s app, and walked
in the necessary direction until the blue dot was reunited with the red line of
the trail. I felt the very opposite of a
survivalist, but I didn’t stay thirsty for very long.
Andrew was waiting at the water
cache under the second bridge at Scissors Crossing, and we exchanged a hug and
good wishes before I hurried off to try to hitchhike into town before the post
office closed at noon.
 |
| Andrew writing in the register at the Scissors Crossing water cache |
[i] Trail
registers are typically books where hikers sign themselves in on their way
through. So far I’ve signed the one at
the trailhead, one at the grocery store in Mt. Laguna,
and two at water caches maintained by trail angels along the trail. The information recorded includes names, when
people came through, and sometimes there’s a space for people to where they’re
from and/or leave comments. They’re a
nice way to see where people you’ve met are at, and are probably useful in the
event that someone goes missing.
[ii] http://www.pctwater.com/, I had bought a
printout of it at the hiker supply store in Mt. Laguna
but now access it online.
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