I stopped briefly at the hot springs to chat with a few other hikers and make some coffee, and then set out to night hike.
There's a lot of traffic between Hesperia and the hot springs, about a seven mile hike, so the trail was the dirtiest I'd seen it - grafitti on the rocks, cigarette butts on the trail, and even pieces of trash here and there, including the broken neck of a beer bottle in one place. Now, I'm someone who thinks that good grafitti can be art - when I see tagged boxcars rolling by, I smile - but who has to spray their stupid tag on a hiking trail?
I camped along the bank of a dam and woke up to walk a few more miles into Hesperia. The lightweight solar charger that I'd felt so clever for buying in on my last trip home had turned out not to be strong enough to charge an iPhone, and my battery was in the red. For the most part the PCT is pretty easy to follow so I wouldn't complain about being a day or two without my navigational device, but the phone is also my camera and I'm not willing to be without that.
I walked a few miles to a dirt road that led to a highway to Hesperia. As I reached it a woman wearing a t-shirt with the PCT logo was pulling up in an SUV. She began unloading supplies for hikers, and I asked about a place to charge my phone. She examined her car but concluded that the necessary attachment was absent. A man walked up with a large cross around his neck, holding a large, dog-eared book, various pages marked with colored tape, which I took to be a bible. The woman in the PCT shirt asked him if he was headed to town, and he said yes. He asked me about the PCT with interest, and said that it was too bad he didn't have his auxiliary battery with him.
"The only thing I can do," he said, "is give you some money."
"I don't need money," I said, "I just need my battery charged. You're going into town, right? Can you give me a ride?"
"No," he answered, shaking his head and giving me a knowing look, "I can't do that."
I started to cry out of sheer anger, and a man pulled up in a big extended cab pickup. I explained my situation, and he let me into the truck. His name was Bobby, and as he drove me to Hesperia I was too upset to even try to make a good impression.
"That guy was wearing a cross and carrying a bible - some Christian!"
"Some people just aren't very trusting," Bobby said.
I wondered, though. The guy seemed to know about the PCT and about hikers - he couldn't possibly have taken me for a random prostitute lost in the desert with a large backpack and a set of hiking poles.
Bobby said he was going to drop me at a store that was actually south of town, so I wouldn't be too far from the trail. After about five minutes he stopped in front of a nondescript building, and told me to get out and go around to the other side of it. I thanked him, collected my things, and walked around. He could not have dropped me in a better place. A small store sat facing a public park. A picnic table in front of it was next to an outdoor power outlet, and a water fountain stood a short distance into the grass. Ducks wandered about, and a couple with a toddler strolled towards the nearby playground. Inside the tiny store friendly women sold orange soda and ice cream. They actually sold other things as well, but nothing else was important. The women expressed interest in the trail, and I realized that they probably didn't get much hiker traffic on account of Hesperia not being in the guidebook. One even offered me a shower, and I showed myself a hiker by replying
"Thank you so much, but I just had one yesterday!"
My phone was soon charged up and a friendly dog walker offered to take me back to the trail. He went by Chief and had heritage from three different tribes, the names of which he listed quickly and I failed to write down.
When he dropped me off the woman in the PCT t-shirt had been joined by another woman and they were fully set up, and I realized that they were trail angels. They were making root beer floats, grilling hot dogs, and spooning potato salad, and I regretted having eaten my leftover burrito in front of the convenience store.
I left them and hiked up a steep hill in the hot sun listening to Slaughterhouse 5, which I regretted having started. A description of torture early in the book (not performed, only described by one army private to another) made my skin crawl for days, and I couldn't forgive Vonnegut for it.
I eventually came to a man-made hill that looked like another dam.
I walked along it and through some sort of industrial site, but I couldn't tell what it was.
It was something where security was a concern, but I couldn't
at least not until I passed the main entrance. I didn't know if this was water for Los Angeles, or what, but it seemed to be pretty important.
After that stretch I suddenly and happily found myself on a lake,
and before long spotted a small beach off the trail,
where I lanced and dressed the blisters that I now had from carrying all of that stupid food.
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| I don't know why, but I just loved this scene of trees. |
When I had first started hiking my grad school buddy John had written me to say that his sister Jamie lived in Hesperia, and he'd introduced us via e-mail. I e-mailed her from the little store by the park and she called me back while I walked around the lake, and we agreed that she would pick me up from near Interstate 138 the next morning for breakfast. I hiked away from the lake and crossed the interstate in the dark, where I saw this combination of signs that made me laugh for some reason:
I camped less than a mile past the highway, in an open pavilion intended for day use barbecuing that even had electrical outlets. The night before, up on the reservoir, I'd seen a creepy looking insect as I laid out my sleeping pad and bag, and had been inspired to sleep in my tent rather than cowboy camp. This night I cowboy camped on the cement floor of the pavillion, and woke to find that one of the very same insect had slept between my sleeping pad and the mylar blanket I'd laid between it and the cement.
In the morning Jamie picked me up, and took me back to her house where she lived with her dad and her boyfriend, who was a long-haul trucker and was sleeping after having rolled in at 5:00 AM that morning. She fed me mimosas, fresh fruit and cottage cheese, eggs and bacon, and even made me take a couple of beers back to the trail with me. We laughed and gabbed about everything under the sun, and I felt relaxed in the way that you do around people that you don't have to act proper around.
Jamie had been involved with a really cool sounding program called "Girls on the Run," which works with 8 to 13 year old girls that are at risk and uses running as a medium. The program sounded really cool and I want to put a link to it here, but I'm having trouble with the outdated browser on the library computers. Jamie had also traveled with the trucker boyfriend through what sounded like most of the western states, and she told me a little bit about the trucker culture. My favorite phrase was "lot lizard," which is a prostitute that works the truck stops. She said that there are even stickers that truckers can buy for their windows that are like a "no smoking" sign but instead of a cigarette have a lizard on them, indicating that they don't want to be solicited:
I was fascinated by this insight into a subculture and asked probably the next 20 hikers I met if they knew this phrase, and many did.
I wanted to make it to the McDonalds on Interstate 15 by evening, so after breakfast Jamie drove me back to where she had picked me up, and I hiked off with my beers.
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| I chilled the beers in the first creek I came to... |
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| ...and toasted one to Jamie and one to John - thanks guys! |
I hiked through more desert, descending steeply,
and was interested when I saw trucks pulling off of I-15 right where I was headed to intersect it, thinking that maybe I would see a lot lizard and have a visual image to match my new vocabulary.
However, as I got closer I realized that it wasn't an actual truck stop and only a weigh station with three state troopers parked in it.
I headed north the few hundred yards to McDonalds, which was a sweet oasis of grease and sugar and other exhausted hikers. There I ran into Snort, who I'd worked with at the kickoff. She was over her bout with mono but was still having some health problems, so she was headed up to the home of some trail angels a few hundred miles north to recuperate for a few weeks before picking up the trail again in the Sierras. I spent hours eating, uploading photos to Drop Box using their wifi, and sorting through my ridiculously heavy pack. I gave in and threw away about half of of the food that I still had on me, and berated myself for not doing it sooner. When they finally closed the McDonalds at 11:00 PM and I had to leave, I set out night hiking again. The trail went under Interstate 15 in a big, creepy cement culvert, and then began to wind up into the hills. at one point a train ran by in the distance on my left. It disappeared behind trees and then was visible in the distance to my right, and I realized I must have to cross train tracks as well. When I reached them there was another culvert, metal this time, and I walked through it, feeling like everything was a bit surreal.
I hiked uphill until dawn began,
and then laid my sleeping bag out on the trail. I was already into the area that hikers were advised to detour around on account of poodle dog bush, but detouring meant a short bushwack to a jeep road, and it seemed counterintuitive to me to leave a trail and walk through bushes in order to avoid a bush that I had no idea how to identify.
The next morning I found a sign left by another hiker identifying it, and this is what it looks like:
As you can see in the picture below, the reason it's growing so much further south than usual this year is that it's an early stage colonizer, and has moved into areas that were hit hard by forest fires.
I spent most of the next day climbing, and reached the ski resort, where several huge pools of water sat behind fences. They were for making snow for the local ski resort - I have no idea how water is turned into snow mechanically, but apparently it is.
The last few miles were pretty painful - from McDonalds to Wrightwood was 28 miles, mostly uphill, and I hiked it in 20 hours, between 11:00 PM on one day and 7:00 PM the next. I'd been leapfrogging with a girl named Jessie and we'd decided to hitchhike into town together and share a hotel room. Jessie was from Seattle and had spent years working as a back country ranger. She would regularly be out in the woods for 5 days at a time, and said that it was a common prank for the other rangers to plant heavy things in her backpack. She told me a number of different stories, the best of which was a waffle iron, which she had luckily caught before hiking out with it.
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| Hiking down through the ski resort |
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| Jessie |
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| Jessie in a picture I'd taken earlier, when we'd caught a ride out to the trail together in Big Bear |
We made it in to town, where we got the last room at the Pines Motel and showered while the owners did our laundry. By the time we'd finished it was past dinner time and there were no other hikers out, so we had a quiet pizza dinner at the restaurant/bar on the corner. I had a pizza with boneless hot wings, pineapple, and red onion, and dipped each bite in more hot wing sauce. Walking the 100 yards back to the hotel room we passed a bar. Neon signs advertised various liquors and beers, and music streamed out from inside. A group of four good looking guys stood on the porch, and nodded to us. I looked at Jessie.
"All I want to do is sleep." She nodded in agreement.
"Me too." We laughed and stumbled back to our hotel room.
