Paradise to Idyllwild, April 21st – 22nd

Jessie and I rose early, broke camp, and set off on the 30 or so miles to Idyllwild.  We were already at 5,000 feet but would reach 9,000 shortly after the town, and the heat was becoming more intense daily. 

We fell into a comfortable routine where I would charge off ahead of her, full of steam, then tire out and take a break during which she would catch up to me, so that we mainly hiked alone and took breaks together.  We entertained ourselves by trading dirty hash songs, and even made up a new song or two.  Mid-day we caught up with Charlie and Claire, a British couple that we had each met at points further south.  The four of us fell into the same pattern of hiking alone and stopping together, which allowed for breaking up the monotony of the desert without trying to match someone else's pace. 

Charlie and Claire

Claire and I hiked together for a stretch and she told me that Charlie was two CDTs short of a Triple Triple Crown.  A Triple Crown hiker is someone who has thru-hiked the PCT in the west, the Appalachian Trail (AT) from Georgia to Maine in the East, and the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) from New Mexico to Montana in the middle.  A Triple Triple Crown hiker is someone who has done each trail three times.

"How do you, um... finance that?"  Claire laughed. 

"He has a house that he rents out.  I have a few houses myself, but I still do contract work - I'm a little more high maintenance!"  Claire didn't sound terribly high maintenance; this was her first thru-hike but she had joined Charlie for long sections of other trails and had made a number of impressive trips, including a bicycle tour from Alaska to the southern tip of South America.  Moreover, her contract work was in the animation industry, and her most recent job had been in Spain, managing a team of young Spanish animators and working in Spanish.  I thought back to my job at CRRC.  The mostly young and all well-educated Georgians had spoken better English than I did, but we had once conducted a two-day training attended by participants from Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as Georgia, and the language of that training had been Russian.  Elene, a junior fellow at the organization, young mother of two and fluent in four languages, had edited my PowerPoint presentation painstakingly.  The Georgians all knew me well enough to know that they could interrupt and correct me when I made mistakes, and they did.  When I was lost for a word I stopped and threw it out in English, and they gave it to me in Russian.  Late in the second afternoon there was even a discussion that I couldn't keep up with, and it was interpreted for me.  I had been speaking Russian conversationally for years and I could not have pulled that training off without the help of the entire Georgian staff, so I had some appreciation for the level of fluency needed to work in a second language.  No, I thought to myself, high-maintenance did not really describe Claire.  

Charlie carried the smallest solar charger I had ever seen (visible in the picture above), and I realized that I needed to rethink my power strategy.  The solar chargers I had seen in Radio Shack had been more weight than I was willing to add to my pack, so I had gone with a small auxiliary battery that could be charged up at a power source and then used to charge the phone later, but at the rate my phone sucked down the batteries, even in airplane mode, I had a maximum of three days, and more like two if I did anything stupid like leave it out of airplane mode for a few hours. 

The most useless sign ever - yeah, it's a trail, thanks.

Heading up, up, up in the hot sun

I got really excited by this field because it was at least a small change of scenery (Claire on the right).

I don't know what lake this is.

You know you've been hiking through the desert too long when you get excited by the interesting shape of a rock like this.

I also wondered why I seemed to need so much more water than everyone else.  Jessie and the Brits carried a liter or two for ten-mile stretches, while I drank my full five-liter capacity between each water source.  I vaguely remembered something from a general environmental sciences class in college, "the light intensity peak of the day is around noon, and there's a lag of three hours until the heat intensity peak."  I resolved to spend that three-hour period laying down in the shade before continuing on in the late afternoon, but by noon I was low on water and the nearest source was a few miles up the trail, so that idea went out the window.  I was completely out by the time we reached the spot where a steep side trail lead about a mile downhill to some stagnant water, and I hiked down to it and back, envying Charlie and Claire who shared water and took turns making off-trail water runs.  I made burritos with the instant refries, found a spot in the brush with cover from the wind, and rolled out my sleeping pad and bag, telling the others to go on without me. 

I lay there writing in my journal until it was dark, and then packed up and continued on.  I still felt a little dizzy from the day's heat, but the cool of the night was soothing and the woozy feeling abated a little as I walked.  I passed a sign marking the entrance into the San Bernardino National Forest, and began to climb.  I passed the spot where the Brits' tents were pitched and Jessie lay in the open in her sleeping bag, but I wanted to cover as much ground as possible out from under the punishing sun.  As I walked the trail got steeper and the dropoff along the edge sharper, and the lights of Palm Springs stretched out in the valley below. 

In the morning I met up with Mike D, who I'd met in Julian, and hiked with him on and off throughout the day.  He also hiked with far less water than I did, and began to wonder what was wrong with me.  We climbed until the the heat abated, and a new phenomenon emerged:  snow.  It was impossible, but it was there.  

The trail reaches about 9,000 feet in the Idyllwild area, so there are still patches of snow.

The dirt on the left side is the trail, and the rocks drop off straight down.

Another sketchy dropoff - this is looking straight down off the trail..

A section of the trail still covered in snow

Between the patches of snow and the steep dropoffs I wondered about the decision to do more night hiking.  I even fell hard coming off of one patch of snow, but was lucky and fell forward and onto soft ground instead of rock. 

Another hiker melting snow for water.

Mike D and I passed another hiker who was traveling without any kind of water purification system, and was melting snow in his JetBoil.  Mike had the Sawyer Squeeze, the new ultralight water filtration system.  Filters do away with the need to treat water chemically and the need to wait for that treatment to work, but they're typically heavy relative to other methods.  The Sawyer Squeeze, however, weighs about three ounces, and is the hot new item.  I briefly considered buying one but then met a hiker who had broken the O-ring on his and was waiting for a replacement, and decided to stick with my low-tech bleach system. 

At one point the trail forked and I took a left where I should have taken a right, which led me to the edge of a cliff:

The split in trails, with Mike D posing on the right

The trail to the left, which I shouldn't have followed.

The views that made it worth taking the wrong trail

We passed with a father, his two teenaged daughters, and an adorable dog.  The dog made a move towards me, and the father quickly grabbed it. 

"She's friendly," he said, straining, "she just jumps up."

"Let her go," I said, laughing.  "The only thing that might happen is that I might get her dirty."  He let the dog tackle me, and we stood chatting for awhile.  They were out on a hike in practice for the John Muir Trail, which they would do later that summer. 

I'm always a sucker for a cute dog.

"That's great you're getting some practice in," I told the girls.  You'll get a chance to see what you wish you had in your pack, and what you're carrying for no reason and want to leave at home."

"Yeah," Mike D said, "like my rock collection.  I just really don't need it." 

"And my bowling ball," I shouted, "I haven't seen a bowling alley in like a hundred miles!"  We left the family laughing, and continued on to Saddle Junction. 

Saddle Junction

From Saddle Junction the Devil's Slide trail descends 2.5 miles down an aptly-named trail to Humber Park, from which a road leads another few miles into the town of Idyllwild. 

On the Devil's Slide Trail

At the bottom of the Devil's Slide

The road dead-ended at the park but we waited only a few minutes before getting a ride.  A friendly local plumbing contractor named Herk gave us a ride into town, pointing out restaurants and hotels of interest, and even gave us his card and told us to call him if we needed a ride back to the trail. 

Herk

Mike D went to check into the hotel room that he had arranged to share with two other hikers, but I headed straight to the first place that had a sign saying "barbecue."  I sat gorging myself on Cobb salad, chicken wings, and Cadillac margaritas and talking to the locals in the bar, until I got a text from Jessie.  All of the local hotels were full on a Monday night due to some sort of group purchase deal analogous to Groupon, but she was paying $20 to stay with another hiker who had secured a room and said I could do the same if I talked to him.  Eli and his dog Cleo eventually joined us as well, and the four of us spent the evening showering, drinking rum that Jessie had bought, and watching "hiker porn," which was our new name for the food channel. 

"My god, did you see the waffles on that plate?"

"Did they seriously fit a piece of fried chicken in there?"

"Oh, here comes the money shot!"

My badge of honor:  Salt from sweat crusted on the OUTSIDE of my hat.