I spent Thursday with a hangover, accomplishing nothing but a blog post and dinner at a Himalayan restaurant a few blocks from the hostel. They even had beer imported from Nepal, which I took a fuzzy picture of:
The next day I set out to "slack pack" from Onyx cache, where I'd gotten off the trail, to Van Dusen Canyon road with a group of hikers that had also gotten off at the Onyx cache. Slack packing is hiker terminology for hiking without the bulk of your gear. Big Bear is a good location for this, because the trail comes up from the south along it's east side, and then wraps around it and heads west along it's north side, and there are routes in to town from trail miles 252, 265, and 275, roughly. We got a ride to the Onyx cache with Papa Smurf and Mountain Mama, a couple who were well known as trail angels in the area, and the 23 miles to Van Dusen canyon road should have been easy. Unfortunately, while at my family's house I had gone to the REI in Rancho Cucamonga and exchanged my Salomons for a pair of Merrell barefoot trail running shoes. I loved Salomons both for running and for hiking but had blown out two pairs in about six months, so I thought I'd try a different brand. The barefoot running shoes were so comfortable that I was skipping around the REI in them, and I stupidly jumped in. The sales lady didn't think that they'd last any longer than the Salomons and I chose to buy them anyways, but what I completely failed to consider was the fact that your feet and legs need time to adjust to barefoot running shoes. You're supposed to do a mile a day in them for awhile, and then two miles a day in them, and so on until your body has adjusted, and not just start out hiking 20 miles a day cold turkey.
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| Someone had left not only a cache of water and sodas, but had actually lugged a couch up here for hikers to rest on. |
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| I'd been seeing horse poop for 250 miles, and finally saw a horse! |
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| Is this a Joshua tree? |
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| More desert... |
Even carrying almost no weight, by mile 265 I was in enough pain that I was afraid of doing myself permanent damage if I kept going, so I got off the trail there and hitchhiked. I was picked up by Katie, a friendly young mother driving back from esthetician school in Victorville. From the hostel I limped to a nearby snowboard shop and bought a new pair of Salomons, followed by an ice cream sundae from a woman named Virginia who had an adult daughter and son who both lived in Hawaii and many questions about the trail. I mailed the Merrells back to REI and then limped to the grocery store and bought food for the longest stretch of the trail yet without resupply, and spent the evening sorting food and packing.
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| Katie |
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| Virginia |
The next day I took the city bus to the library, made my blog post, and then caught a ride back to the trail with the same group I'd ridden out with the day before. They'd slack packed all the way to Van Dusen Canyon Road at 275, but said that the driver was willing to take me to Highway 18 at 265 after that, and another girl who also needed the 265 mark joined at the last minute as well.
Mountain Lion drove us to the trail in a huge sort of ATV, the exact likes of which I'd never seen before, and told us stories about the area. He said that Belleville, which had been located a mile past the trail on the Van Dusen Canyon road, had been the site of a huge gold rush, and had lost a popular election for becoming the county seat by two votes. It was said that the election would have gone to Belleville if votes from that area had not been lost, by some accounts by a box of ballots falling off of a truck, and by other accounts by a stack of ballots unintentionally being kicked into the fire by a person counting them. At any rate, Belleville was now deserted, having failed to become the seat of the largest county in the United States and then withering away to nothing in later years.
Mountain Lion gave us all his phone number, telling us to call if we had any problems on the trail and he would come and rescue us wherever we were, dropped the group of four off, then dropped Jessie and I off, and promised to stay in touch. I sat on Highway 18 trying to fit all of the food into my pack for a good 45 minutes, and then finally set off in the early evening.
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| Mountain Lion, on the left - he plans to thru-hike next year, and everyone who can should support him along the way because he is really generous to hikers. |
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| The group going to Van Dusen canyon in the background, and Jessie and I headed for Highway 18 in the foreground |
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| Posing with Mountain Lion's ATV |
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