Day 16: Eat All The Things: a zero in Idyllwild

May 6th
Mileage: zeroooooo

Fun vocab: a zero is a day where you don’t hike at all.

I woke at dawn in the sofa bed and got up and cranked the heat. I had a fleece blanket wrapped around me, and I wore it like a cloak as I made eggs and kale. I’d been so cold the day before; I never wanted to be cold again. After a while Angela got up and we sat in the light from the window, eating breakfast and quietly running errands on our phones. It was raining hard outside and the world was grey; we’d been lucky. We had made it over the mountains just before the storm, and now it was the perfect day for this zero in a warm cabin in a little mountain town.

I wrote a million emails and paid some bills, trying frantically to deal with the real-world business that piles up when you’re away. I didn’t want to write emails, I didn’t want to do internet errands. Everything felt so far away; I just wanted to think about hiking. But what can you do.

The heat pumped merrily from the wall heater. I moved to the recliner by the fireplace, blanket still wrapped around me, and put my ankle up on a little baggie of ice. I could hear the rain outside. I was so happy I almost couldn’t stand it.

Ben and Thyra got up and we went on a family field trip across the street to the post office, limping on our sore feet in the cold drizzle. I had my frogg toggs rain jacket on, it was the first time since I’d gotten it in the mail that I’d unfolded it from its little square. Frogg toggs are these super cheap rain jackets you can buy. They’re lighter than any other rain jacket and they feel as though they’re made of paper. Once I opened it I discovered that mine was huge. It was like a tent on me and I felt ridiculous, walking past all the other thru hikers at the pizza shop.

Stop feeling ridiculous, I thought. Nobody cares.

At the post office I finally got to send the stack of postcards I’d been writing for the past few weeks! If I owe you a postcard, expect it soon! And if you want a postcard from me, click the tab at the top of this page.

We picked up our resupply boxes at the little post office (welcome to Idyllwild! Said the ladies working there. Sign our trail register?) and hauled them back to the cabin and spread our loot on every available surface. Then we began the long chore of sorting our goods and objects before the next hundred mile stretch of our epic overland journey.

I made a lot of vegetables and ate them. I ate the chicken salad and the apples and the chocolate pudding. Thyra and Ben ate more pizza, and brought home a giant cinnamon roll. I ate some of the cinnamon roll, some reeses pieces, and a bunch of Angela’s ritz bitz sandwiches. I spaced out for a while, curled up in the recliner in my fleece blanket.

Angela and I walked in the rain to the thrift store. Angela needed a new desert shirt. She had started the hike with a white button-down shirt made of cotton, but the cotton had been cold and damp. At kickoff, in a hiker box, she’d scored a shirt made of blue silk. We’d hiked across the desert and the silk, faced with sun and wind and salt and friction, had disintegrated in a hilarious way. Now Angela had nothing but this shredded and faded blue silk shirt that looked, as Ben put it, as though she had dug it up from a river bed.

We were looking for a cotton-poly blend button-down shirt, because those are cheap and good for the desert.

The thrift store was a ways down the highway, in a little log building called the “help center”. Inside people poked around in the corners, talking quickly. We rifled through the racks of shirts, but the only thing we found that could work was a giant polyester leopard-print blouse. Angela put it on and it hung off of her like a tent. You could see light through it.

“Well,” said Angela, “I guess this will have to work.”

We also found a white dress with bright flowers and a green silk skirt.

“Let’s get these too!” We said. “We can wear them with dinner.”

For dinner we made the gluten-free pasta from my resupply box with vegetables and roast chicken from the dirty little grocery store. Thyra put on the white dress and Ben wore the giant leapord print shirt. After dinner we made a fire in the fireplace and opened the door that led from our cabin to the next, where some other hikers were staying. They came over and parked on the sofa and we all hung out, talking about blisters.

One of the hikers was Lionheart. This was her second time hiking the PCT. She had a bit of floss threaded through her heel blister.

“You just thread the floss through with a needle,” she said, “and leave it there. It keeps it draining and then it heals as a callous.”

I wanted to ask Lionheart about so many things, but I was too tired. I just laid in the recliner with my blanket wrapped around me and listened to everyone talk.

Angela burned her silk shirt in the fire, to symbolize the end of her first stretch on the PCT. Instead of burning, the shirt melted onto the logs, but then it dissapeared.

I took a bath. It was too hot but I made myself stay in it. When I got out of the bath people were still up, smoking a joint next to the fire. I felt irritated and sort of crowded.

“I want to go to sleep,” I said. Hikers are nice people, and they dissapeared to their cabin. I pulled out the sofa bed and slept.   

Day 15: Angry on the mountain and idyll idyll idyllwild

May 5th
Mileage 17 (13.5 plus 1 mile side trail to water and the 2.5 mile Devil’s side trail)
Mile 166 to mile 179.4

I woke in the middle of the night thirsty but I had no water. I stared at the dark walls of the cave. When dawn comes, I decided, I’m gonna book it that last mile to the spring.

I was up and out of camp before the others. Usually I was slow in the morning- we were all slow. I was trying to be faster- I knew that it was one of the secrets of doing long miles, getting up fast and on the trail by dawn. But it was hard.

It was windy on the mountain just past the cave. It seemed we’d found the only wind-free spot, and as soon as I was hiking again the wind was there, battering me.

I followed a steep path downhill to where the spring would be. The path turned into a dim grassy road with dark trees overhead and then there was the spring, trickling from a hose into a huge plastic tub. Above the tub in the hill there was a little pool that trickled in the rock, and I filled my bottles there. I shivered. It was damp and cold at the spring, and I couldn’t get warm. The cold wind had taken all the warmth from me the day before, and I couldn’t seem to get it back. And I’d used the last ounce of my energy too. I felt as though I had nothing left for today. After filling my bottles I sat on the path and ate the oatmeal I’d soaked the night before, then I dug through my food bag- all the food I had left until Idyllwild was a salami log and some stale chocolate that had melted and rehardened a dozen times in its little ziploc bag. The day’s hike consisted of steep climb after steep climb after steep climb, for 14 miles, and then a 2.5 mile descent to the road. Well, I said. Well.

The path was rocky and narrow on the mountaintops and all day the wind blew. I dragged myself forward with infinite slowness, stopping constantly to drink water, to tighten my shoelaces, to try and suck the warmth from a patch of sunlight. Thyra passed me, then Ben, and I didn’t know where Angela was. For hours I saw no-one. I’m the only one on this mountain, I said. I looked down the steep, rocky slopes to the convoluted foothills below, feeling as though the wind would blow me off my feet. The path was at eight thousand feet, then ten thousand, then back to eight. I felt nauseous and I didn’t know why.

I tried to eat my salami but then I remembered that I’d handed my knife to Angela in the morning to cut the tape for her blisters and I’d forgotten to get it back. I sat on a rock in the dust and opened the salami with my teeth, tearing the casing with my fingernails. The salami was oily and salty and I ate half of it in big bites, folding the rest carefully away. It didn’t help my nausea, but at least I wouldn’t be hungry. Altitude sickness, I thought. I’ve got myself some altitude sickness.

There’s not enough blood in my blood, I thought.

I’m having a low moment, I thought an hour later, when I was sitting next to the trail again, unable to move.

As I hiked, exhausted, my anxiety overwhelmed me- I thought about situations that angered me, things that could go wrong, things I had no control of. I was overwhelmed by waves of my own anger- I was suddenly angry at everything, angry at life, angry at all humans everywhere, and there was no outlet for my anger. It was just me, alone on the mountaintop, dizzy and nauseous and fatigued, moving my legs along the rocky path by sheer force of will.

If I can just get down the mountain, I thought. We’d made a reservation for the night at the Idyllwild inn, the four of us a in a little cabin. I’d never been to Idyllwild, and I had no idea what to expect. I imagined a hot bath, a soft bed, a giant pile of food. I felt overwhelmed by my desire for these things. I lost myself in my longing for them, imagining how they would taste and smell and feel, but when I came back into my body I was still on the rocky path, stumbling along at eight thousand feet, the wind battering me and the earth dropping away on both sides into nothingness.

Everything is fine, I told myself. Forever and ever and ever.

In the early afternoon I reached the Devil’s slide trail that switchbacked down the steep pine forest into Idyllwild. 2.5 miles, I told myself. Just 2.5 miles more. My whole body hurt- all my muscles and tendons and joints cried out, and I descended slowly, stepping carefully so as not to hurt my achilles tendon. Going down is so hard, I thought. So hard when you are sore. Dayhikers passed me on their way up the mountain. I could smell their shampoo and laundry detergent, their hopes and dreams and fears. They stared at me, the dirty windburned person mincing slowly down the trail. I frowned back at them. You have no idea how big my desires are, I thought.

By the time I reached the trailhead parking lot I was nearly having an anxiety attack. I got this way, I realized, right before I was about to get the thing that I had been anticipating for dozens of miles. What if I don’t get it? I thought. What if none of it actually comes to be? Oh my god oh my god oh my god.

The parking lot was huge and flat and I couldn’t see the end of it. I chose a direction and began to walk, looking for the road, but then the lot just ended, and the thought that I had walked for five minutes in the wrong direction filled me with panic. I cut down across some brush to the road and stuck my thumb out, watching as the day hikers drove past without slowing. Then, after just a moment, a sedan appeared. A teenage boy was driving.

“You need a ride to town?” He asked.

“Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”

“I hiked the PCT last year,” he said. “Me and my brother came up here to go climbing. Today we’re just driving around looking for hiker trash.”

The boy’s name was Minor. I got in the car. I felt as though my head was buzzing.

“Thank you,” I said.

Minor dropped me at the Idyllwild Inn. It had just begun to rain. I limped to cabin 15 and pushed open the door. It was quiet and dark inside. There was a big couch, an easy chair, and a fireplace with a stack of wood. On the other side of the room was a small kitchen and a table with four chairs. In the back was a bedroom. Thyra and Ben were in bed, fresh from the shower.

“You made it!” They said when they saw me.

Angela appeared a moment later. She had been just behind me, apparently, but we hadn’t seen each other all day. She was haggard and windburned, scraps of fabric hanging off of her pack as though the mountain had shredded her.

“There are no words,” I said. “No words for today.”

In the shower it took me a long time to wash the dirt from my legs. After bathing I stretched, drank lots of water, and took two ibuprofen. Angela had some ginger tea she’d been carrying for almost two hundred miles, and she let me make a cup.

“I can’t believe we have a kitchen,” I said.

“And a fire!” Said Angela. “We can have a fire!”

Thyra and Ben went across the street to get pizza, and Angela and I limped in the rain to the grocery store. It was a small store, sort of yellowed inside, and the food was piled haphazardly on the shelves. I bought two bunches of kale, three apples, six eggs, three avocados, a bag of tortilla chips, a jar of cheap salsa, a lime, a tub of chicken salad from the deli, and a container of chocolate pudding. Angela bought kale, eggs, celery, apples, peanut butter and ritz bitz sandwiches. On the way back to the cabin we passed the pizza place. Thyra was sitting at a table outside, comatose.

“I ate two pizzas,” she said. “I ate two whole pizzas.”

I ordered a gluten-free pepperoni pizza, and Angela ordered one with basil on it. We ate our pizzas back at the cabin with the heat cranked way up and then I sat in the easy chair, which was, amazingly, a recliner, with my ankle up on a bag of ice and a big fleece blanket wrapped a hundred times around me.

“I feel so happy here,” I said. “I don’t want to ever walk again.”

Outside the rain fell harder. It was Sunday, and we had plans to stay at the cabin until Tuesday, after the storm had passed. I shuddered, deep in my blanket, as I thought of the hikers still up on the mountain. Apparently it was snowing up there now, way up on the rocky passes.   

That night Angela and I slept on the foldout sofa bed while Ben and Thyra got the big bed in back. Climbing onto that worn mattress after so many nights on my rock-hard sleeping pad was like falling into a soft pit of euphoria. I lay there, waves of pleasure washing over me. I felt as though there was nothing below me at all.

“I’m on a cloud,” I said. “It’s like I’m laying on a cloud.” And then I was asleep.

  

Day 14- wherein the brutality we hadn’t anticipated becomes real

Mileage 19- 17 plus 2 mile side trail to the cafe
Mile 149 to mile 166

In the morning we were up in a flash and at the Paradise Cafe by the time they opened at 8 a.m.

The Paradise cafe is next to a winding country highway intersection bisected by the PCT and suddenly we were out of the desert hills and sitting on chairs (Chairs! Real chairs! When was the last time we sat in chairs!) surrounded by talking people and traffic and music and our server was bringing us fresh-squeezed orange juice and the hunger monster was so large inside of me that the anticipation was impossible and I was, of course, dissapointed.

“My orange juice is sour,” I said to Ben. “Is your orange juice sour?”

“No,” said Ben. “My orange juice is awesome.”

I ordered some crazy breakfast that I didn’t understand and when it arrived it was a huge hamburger patty, three runny eggs, and a wet strip of hashbrowns. I gave my toast away but later took it back and greedily smeared it with strawberry jam. I can’t eat gluten or dairy without feeling sick, but my hiker hunger overrode any rational thought and I was on an epic quest to Eat All The Things. After finishing the burger, hashbrowns, eggs, toast and my juice, I ordered decaf coffee with a slice of apple pie with ice cream. The pie was warm and flakey and euphoric, and as soon as I was finished I wished that I could eat it over and over, again and again for all of time. I drank three cups of decaf with cream and sugar.

“Will you be staying for lunch?” Asked our server.

“Yes,” we said in unison. “We’ll be staying for lunch.”

I ordered a chocolate shake.

Other hikers had arrived and filled the tables on the patio, along with a motorcycle gang made up of wealthy retirees. I was eating the whipped cream off the top of my shake when there was a terrific crash. We all turned and caught the last moment of a three-car accident at the intersection in front of the cafe- an SUV slamming into a pickup truck and then a prius slamming into the pickup truck.

“Oh my god,” said our server, as she ran out into the intersection. A few men hopped the fence around the patio and ran into the road. The door of the pickup flew open and a woman raced around the truck, yanking open the passenger door. She pulled out a toddler and held the baby to her.

“Oh my god,” I said.

“Someone call 911!” Screamed our server, as she raced from vehicle to vehicle. All the persons present with any sort of helpful experience were clustered around the cars, trying to be of assistance. The people in the Prius stumbled from their vehicle, but the SUV was strangely still. Soon it became apparent that the people inside were hurt but trapped by both their airbags and the frame of the car itself, which had been crushed during the impact.

A fire truck appeared, and they began to cut the occupants out of the SUV. It was a man and a woman and they were alive but bleeding and injured. Then there was the pounding of helicopters and the dust was blowing everywhere. The woman with the baby sat in a plastic patio chair and held him while he screamed. She stared off into nothing. No-one on the patio wanted to eat any longer.

Ben appeared. He had dissapeared as soon as the accident had happened.

“Where did you go?” Said Thyra.

“The man driving the SUV handed me his phone,” said Ben. “I asked him if there was anyone he wanted me to call and he said his sister. So I called his sister and told her that he’d been in a bad accident but he was alive. She started to cry a little on the phone.”

A man with a red beard appeared and leaned over the woman holding the baby, cradling her and stroking her hair. He took the baby from her and the baby screamed.

“Daddy’s here,” he said. “It’s ok, daddy’s here.”

The woman went into an ambulence and the ambulence drove away.

“What happens when you’re in shock?” I asked Angela. “What does shock do to your body?”

“Your vitals go all over the place,” said Angela.

It was noon, and we ordered our lunches to go. I got a large order of fries and they came in a huge styrofoam carton, which I tucked carefully into the top of my pack. We had fourteen miles left to go that afternoon. And all of it was uphill.

We left the little valley of the accident and hiked towards the looming San Jacintos. I was a few minutes ahead of the others and I felt naseous and ill, as though I might vomit. All that food was like hot bricks in my stomach. Each patch of dappled shade I passed called to me. Just lie down here, said the shade. Just lie down here for a little while.

At the place where the trail crossed the road a little tent was set up- it was Dr. Sole, the foot specialist who was also a trail angel. Hikers were slouched there in camp chairs, drinking coors light from a cooler. Dr. Sole was washing a woman’s foot and carefully tending to her blisters.

“Are you the foot psychic?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Dr. Sole.

“Can you tell me if my shoes are too big?”

Dr. Sole had me lift my foot onto a little table and he squeezed around my toes.

“I think your shoes are fine,” he said. “You can wear two pairs of socks if you like.”

Hallelujah, I thought. I sat in one of the camp chairs and waited for the mess in my stomach to calm down. Angela, Ben and Thyra appeared, looking antsy to hike.

“You guys go ahead,” I said. “I just need to rest here for a minute.” Why had I eaten so much food? I thought. And all these things I couldn’t even digest? The hiker hunger was an animal and it was trying to destroy me.

Other hikers arrived while I rested- we’d been told again and again in the last few days that there was a huge group of hikers “just behind us” and now, this morning, it seemed that they were catching up. Even though we were averaging 16 mile days, which felt like plenty to us, we still considered ourselves “slow”, and every day a handful of people passed us. Still, there were a thousand people thru-hiking this year, and when we signed the registers in town we saw that we were around number 350. There were still more people behind us than ahead of us, and we were getting faster every day. And anyway, it’s not a race. Right?

I walked. The trail began to climb. And climb, and climb, and climb. I was leapfrogging with some other hikers and we walked and talked together, and then I happened upon Ben and Angela and Thrya, eating their takeout lunches in a bit of shade. I sat down and had some french fries.

“Going up, huh?” I said.

“Yeah,” they said.

The afternoon cooled and a breeze came up. We climbed and climbed and climbed, our hearts pounding like crazy, sweating in our dirty clothes. After eight miles Angela and I stopped to stretch in a leafy little area next to the narrow trail. A woman appeared and leaned on her trekking poles.

“Are you two going to camp here?” She asked.

“No,” I said. “We’re just stopping to rest.”

“Well ok then I will,” said the woman. “It’s the last spot before the wind.”

The wind? I wondered. What does that even mean?

A few moments later the trail curved around to the west side of the mountain and the leafy forest turned to stunted, twisted shrubs and a seventy mile wind came out of the valley below and began to beat us so hard we could barely breathe.

“It’s freezing!” I said. “It’s fucking freezing up here!”

The trail was a narrow rocky path between the steep jagged mountain and the nothingness of the great empty air below. We were way up high and still climbing. How did we get so high? The wind was like a rolled up newspaper, battering us with all its might. I clutched my hat desperately and stumbled down the path. The wind was a hand pushing me off the trail to my death. The wind was so cold. I’ll stop and put on my down jacket, I thought. But there was nowhere to stop.

The rocky path narrowed and became steeper, the wind only increased. We wound up and over a rocky peak, across a tiny saddle, and over a still higher peak. We repeated this into forever. The rocks in the path were sending bright hot pain into the soles of my feet and I was impossibly cold.

“The rocks are blessing us!” I screamed to Angela. “The rocks are our teachers! They are teaching us about suffereing!”

Angela laughed.

“Thank you rock teachers!” She said. “Thank you thank you thank you!”

“Everything is fine, forever and ever and ever!” I shouted. I was laughing. I had some resevoir inside of me, some emergency thing I didn’t know I had, and I was using it now, for this 14 mile climb into the freezing wind and altitude on top of the world. My muscles burned in pain and I was dizzy with alititude and fatigue. I stumbled down the trail, one small step in front of the other, against the wind. My joints were aching and my hands and face and legs were numb with cold. I only have running shorts! I thought. What is this place?

We’d planned on camping at our next water source at mile 166.5, but a little ways before it the trail wound around to the east side of the mountain and suddenly the wind was gone, and we were in a peaceful leafy forest once again. It was nearly dark, and we swung our headlamps around, looking for a flat place to camp. We were all in some state of stiff-legged limping, running on fumes. Next to the trail was a cave made of huge boulders leaned against each other, and there was a little flat place to camp. Thyra went to check it out and came back spooked. There was an old blanket there, and a bowl and  fork, and the cave was dark and creepy. But if we kept walking we knew we’d end up back on the west side of the mountain, where the wind was, and we’d be totally fucked.

“I think there’s room for us here,” I said. “And the ghosts of old hermits will protect us.”

Ben and Thyra pitched their tent in the little flat spot, and Angela and I lay our ground cloths in the cave, over the ashes of many fires. We were all thirsty and cold and had very little water. I lay in my sleeping quilt in the cave, feeling the remnants of the cold wind moving through my body. I tossed and turned. My legs and feet ached so bad that I couldn’t get comfortable, and every time I closed my eyes I imagined an old hermit ghost, wild and weird and crazy, poking about in the dark, looking for his matted blanket. At last I pulled the quilt all the way over my head, making a space that was dark and warm and close, if a little airless, and I slept. 

Note: for awesome photos, check out Thyra’s blog- http://bearsinthesewoods.blogspot.com

Day 13- Nance Canyon to a few miles before Paradise

Mileage 18
Mile 131 to mile 149

I slept hard deep in my sleeping quilt in the freezing canyon and had strange dreams- I dreamt that a fashion designer was critiquing my posture, and that I saved a boy from drowning. At dawn I sat up in my bag and assembled my oatmeal for soaking- oats, chia seeds and dried fruit with a little water in my plastic peanut butter jar. I would put the jar in my pack, and after a few hours of hiking it would be ready to eat.

The cold made us slow, but as soon as the sun hit us we regretted it. Another hot day in the desert, stumbling in the dust over rocks. I need new nouns to write with, I thought as I plodded up the hills. Dust dust dust, dirt dirt dirt.

At 9 a.m. we arrived at the first water- Tule springs, a little cluster of oak trees in a ravine. The water came out of a metal spigot on the edge of a dusty clearing. There was a short length of hose attached to the spigot. I was caked all over with dirt, and my shirt and shorts were stiff with salt. I dropped my things in the shade and, since the spigot was a little hidden from the trail, I took a sort of bath there. I also took off my shoes and carefully washed my feet, inspecting my blisters- a few of them were hardening into calluses, a few of them had blisters of their own, and I had a new one on my heel. My tendonitis, amazingly, had not been bothering me, although if I pushed myself too hard it would twinge at the end of the day. My heel, now, was like my knees had been, back when I used to bike alot- when they started to twinge I knew I was nearing my edge, that special danger zone where injury happens, and that I needed to back off a little.

Angela, Ben and Thyra arrived and we  rested in the shade. A young man appeared and sat in the dust next to us, pulled a glass jar of jelly from his pack, and began to assemble a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He smiled at us while he ate his sandwich. He had long, beautiful blonde hair and perfect white teeth. His name was Whistler and he carried a huge pack, stuck all over with patches.

“I hiked the AT,” he said. “I got my name there, because I whistled.”

“Did you know that there are whistling competitions?” Said Ben, who was stretching his knee. “My hairdresser was in a whistling competition.”

Thyra was eating runts, those powdery little candies shaped like fruit. 

“I’m running low on food,” she said. “This is all I have to eat, besides things I have to cook. Do you want some runts?” She handed me a handful. Thyra had gotten the runts at a candy shop in portland where they had been sorted by fruit, and she had ended up with only the banana shaped ones. 

A time later after setting out again I happened upon Whistler and Angela at an old concrete cistern on the trail. There was a snake trapped in the cistern, not a rattlesnake but some other kind of snake. The snake was slithering, slither slither slither, but it couldn’t get out of the cistern. Whister stuck his trekking pole in the cistern to try and save the snake.

“Is that a biting kind of snake?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Whistler. “I guess I’ll find out.”

Whistler pulled the snake out and it slithered away, into the creosote bushes.

The afternoon was brutally hot and there was no shade. Our last water source before camping for the night was the Hiker’s Oasis cache and I pushed myself forward in the heat, sweating in my already filthy shirt, telling myself that I’d rest in the shade when I got to the cache. I hadn’t planned my water well and was out before I got there. I stumbled into the cache thirsty and irritated. There was no shade and I filled up my bottles and sat in the dust, feeling angry and overly hot. The others circled around, looking for bits of shade and laughing deleriously. Whistler passed us and walked on into the baking hills. An hour dissapeared somehow, with no relief from the sun, and then we got up and pushed on too. I fell behind the others, walking so slowly it was as though I was dragging myself up the steep trail. The sun, I said. This is what the sun does to me.

The trail climbed up for many hours. I fell further and further behind the others. After a time I spotted two banana shaped runts, a green one and a yellow one, lying on the dusty path. A half hour later there was another one, a red one. And then another, shiny and blue in the dust of the trail. I rounded a bend and there were Thyra and Ben and Angela, sprawled in a bit of prickly shade, looking as though they’d died. I lowered myself onto the ground next to them, wincing at the pain in my hips.

“Sciatica!” I said. “Goddam sciatica! This trail is so steep!”

Angela and Thyra were having intolerable footpain due to their lack of insoles, and Ben had his knee. We lay there in the dirt, feeling small and weak and broken. Of course, after a while, there was nothing to do but move on. There was no water here, and night was coming.

At dusk we reached our campsite, a trampled spot in the chapparal three miles from Highway 74 and the Paradise Valley Cafe. I threw down my ground sheet and my sleeping pad and collapsed in the sand.

“I can barely move,” I said, as I tried to stretch. “All that climbing. I hurt everywhere.” I shook my sleeping quilt to loft it and pulled it over me. The thing I’d read about happening to others had finally happened to me- my exhaustion at the end of each day now overpowered my fear of imaginary desert monsters, and I was cowboy camping every night.

“That climb was so steep,” I said again, before I fell asleep. “I can’t believe how much climbing we just did.”

I had no idea what was to come.  

Day 12- heat, fatigue, and warm potato salad

Mileage 16
Mile 115 to mile 131

I woke in the cold morning next to Agua Caliente and filled my gatorade bottles in the stream. I hadn’t slept well for reasons I didn’t understand and I hiked slowly into the beautiful mountains. The heat came on; we’d heard the day before that there would be a heat wave.

I felt tired, delerious, clumsy; I rolled my ankles lightly; I’d told myself that I wouldn’t take a break until I had hiked twelve miles but the sun came on and I became slower and slower; at last I collapsed in the prickly shade of a large rock and drank water and retaped my blisters. I looked at my watch- I’d been walking so slowly that I may as well have just rested.

“Why am I so tired today?” I wondered. “Why is every day so different?”

Eventually there was a brightly painted sign stuck in some rocks.

Trail angel mike! Said the sign. Water shade shelter!

I stumbled down the dusty side trail and came to a huge steel water tank painted H2O in dripping letters. Beyond that was a house. At the house dirty hikers were lounging tensely in the shade, picking at their feet. Two leathery men were playing ultimate frisbee in the dirt yard. There was a large carton of warm potato salad and I scooped a mound onto a styrofoam plate and ate it sitting at a wicker picnic table.

The back of the house was shady and quiet and we convened there, setting up our little stoves to cook dinner. Thyra and Angela ate and fell asleep in the porch swing. I lit an esbit tab to boil water for my instant refried beans and the awful plastic smell filled the air.

“If you light it in your tent you’ll start to hurl,” said a man named Stats, who was organizing his pack next to us on the patio.

We left at 5:30 to hike the rest of the way to Nance Canyon to camp. Ben had eaten two packets of ramen and a coca cola at mike’s and was in pain; otherwise we were feeling pretty good. The campsite in Nance Canyon was a sandy spot next to an old stream bed and it was freezing there- the cold air sank down and settled there. The next day we would hike 18 miles and camp outside of Paradise Valley Cafe; I had never eaten there but I fell asleep imagining the burgers, and watching the stars, and thinking about life.

Day 11: Warner springs and the burger that was (almost) everything

Mileage 14
Mile 101 to mile 115

I woke in the morning and stared at the sheer fabric of my tent. The bullfrogs were no longer croaking in the trough.

“Good morning!” Said a woman. “Time to get up!” She bent down and peered in my tent. It was the trail angel who stocked the soda springs. She was wearing PCT earrings.

I wedged myself stiffly from my tent and stood. It was after dawn, and all the other hikers had left. I walked gingerly over to the stone trough on my sore bare feet. I reached into the water and selected a diet citrus beverage. I sat cross-legged in the cold morning and drank the soda and ate the last of my dried figs. Now I would have no food. Warner springs was seven miles away, and we would get our food boxes there. We had also heard that there would be burgers.

“What is warner springs?” I wondered, as I drank my diet citrus beverage.

A couple of hikers arrived while I was packing up. I’d met them before, but I couldn’t remember their names. They were all starting to look the same to me- fit white dudes in safari wear, powering over the passes faster than I would ever be able to. One of them I’d met at the third gate cache, where I’d slept beneath the tree- he carried a “chili pad”, which was a sort of towel that never dried. You draped it across your neck in the desert. Now he stood above the trough, and wrung out the towel into the water.

Today the spring was running, and a little water trickled from the pipe into the trough. But the spring was not always running, and hikers after us would have to filter directly from the trough.

No bueno, I thought.

Another man, dressed nearly identically, appeared and dipped his shirt into the trough.

No bueno, I thought again.

To get to Warner Springs we had to leave our little oasis of soda and croaking frogs and hike a winding dusty path through windswept yellow hills. The path went on and on, circled every hill, and sometimes seemed to double back on itself like the background in a video game. We were all out of food and crashing, and the anticipation of food, wonderful magical food, was growing inside of us like a crazy psychotic monster. I’d read that after day ten the “hiker hunger” sets in.

Today the hiker hunger is strong within me, I thought, as I plodded desparingly over those hills.

We passed some cows and a rock shaped like an eagle. We spread out in a natural way, fanning across the trail as we hiked. Each day we would go long stretches without seeing each other, and we would reconvene naturally at water sources and chunks of shade, talking all at once about everything that we had seen.

Angela and I arrived at the road at the same time. There was a fire station there. We stuck out our thumbs. It was a mile or two, we had read, to the post office, and the last thing we wanted was a two mile road walk. After walking on a soft sandy path for a long enough time that you feet are screaming in pain, nothing feels more violent than a road walk.

Several cars did not stop, and then a half hour had passed. Ben and Thyra had taken a side trail to the post office, and would be there by now. I was crashing from lack of breakfast, and I could feel the panic pounding inside me, the wild hunger. Burgers! Burgers! Burgers! Went my thoughts. We began to walk past the fire station and then we saw a woman, beckoning to us from across the road.

“Over here!” She said. “Over here!”

We followed her across an expanse of concrete to a low wooden building, the warner springs community center. Once warner springs had had a resort, and the resort had had a store, and showers, and that was where hikers had done all their business. Now the resort had closed, and so some local people had turned the community center into a fundraiser and a resource for thru-hikers in one.

Two dozen hikers were spread in the shade beneath an oak tree. A man was offering rides to the post office.

“Yes!” I said. “Yes please!”

The man was Billy Goat, a hiker who’d hiked more than ten thousand miles. He was short and wiry and had a long silver beard. The passenger seat of his car had been converted into a bed.

“Do you live in this area?” I asked him.

“I don’t live anywhere,” Said Billy Goat. “When I’m not on the trail I live in my car.”

At the post office we filled our arms with our packages. Thyra and Ben were there, sitting limply on the curb. I ripped open my box and ate a piece of beef jerky. I waited for my blood sugar to stabilize.

A nice woman gave us a ride back to the community center, and we spread our loot beneath an oak tree a little ways from the crowd. I stumbled into the building, feeling crazed.

“No burgers,” said a hiker. “No burgers til dinner time.”

“What?” I said. “What does that even mean?”

No burgers? I thought. The dissapointment within me was tangible and bright, like fire.

The community center had set up a little store, stocked with big boxes of little packages of things. I bought a roll of toilet paper, a bottle of ibuprofen, and two icecream sandwiches. I picked up a bottle of HEET, which you can use as fuel for your alcohol stove. I was out of fuel.

“You want the yellow HEET,” said a man standing next to me. “That’s the red HEET. Use the red HEET and it’ll cover your pot with soot, and the flame won’t ever get hot enough.”

“Walmart was out of the yellow HEET,” said the woman who worked at the community center.

I sat in the grass and ate my icecream sandwiches. My heart pounded with sugar, and time began to slow. I went back into the community center and dug through the hiker boxes. A hundred different kinds of oatmeal, some instant mashed potatoes, and one injinji toe sock. A man was dumping his probars into the hiker box.

“You’re sick of probars?” I said.

“Kind of, yeah,” said the man. I took the probars, which were smushed from being carried a hundred miles, and a little bottle of olive oil. And then, in the bottom of the box, I found four esbit tabs. Esbit tabs are little squares you can light and boil water over.

“I can cook!” I said. “Hallelujah!”

What is an esbit tab? I thought, as I put the squares into my pocket.

A woman walked from the back of the community center with a burger.

“Can I order a burger?” I asked her.

“Well of course you can hon, until four o’clock.”

I looked at my watch. It was 3:30. I could order a burger! My first town burger! After all this time!!

“Can I have a burger with a double patty?” I asked.

“Sure. What color gatorade you want?”

I enjoyed this for a moment, the fact that she had asked me what color of gatorade I wanted, and not what flavor.

“Orange,” I said.

Next to the hiker box was a little table with carafes of coffee and a glass jar of fresh cookies. I returned to this jar throughout the afternoon, and at last count I think I’d eaten a dozen. I ate my burger sitting in the grass beneath our oak tree, squirting the bare dry patty with mustard and ketchup until it was dripping. Still I could barely get it into my stomach.

“I feel sick,” I said. “I think I feel sick.”

“Do you think this is enough food for four days?” Said Thyra, holding up her tiny food bag. We had each jettisoned much of our resupply boxes into the hiker box, as food, we had decided, was heavy, and our next stop was only a few days away. It was 65 miles till Idyllwild, the little mountain town that was our next stop. We would be hiking uphill for almost all of those 65 miles. We would hike from the baking desert up into the freezing, wind-blasted peaks of the San Jacinto Mountains. It would be one of the steepest climbs of the entire PCT.

Of course we didn’t know any of that yet.

“Yeah, that looks like enough food,” I said.   

When we’d first arrived at the center I’d washed my socks with my tiny bottle of dr. Bronner’s in the spigot behind the building, and now they were dry where I’d laid them to bake in the sun. I put them on, happy that they were warm and smelled like peppermint. Foot care is important on the PCT, more important than you can possibly imagine. There are blisters, hot spots, small injuries, and at the end of each day the kind of radiating foot pain that keeps you from sleep. Some days it feels as though you are literally wearing your feet away on the jagged surface of the earth.

My ritual is this: After every ten miles I wash my feet. If there is no running water I use my “PCT class of 13″ bandanna, pouring a little water onto it. When you hike dust and sand infiltrate your shoes, and that sand will abrade your skin until they are a pulpy, bloody mess. So I wash my feet every chance I get.

I also wash my socks a lot. It’s best to change them twice a day, wash the dirty pair, and hang them to dry on your pack. If you can’t do this then at least bang the dust out of them on a rock.

Every night before bed I remove the tape from my blisters and wash my feet again. I don’t wear sleeping socks, because I like to let my blisters dry out at night. In the morning I retape my blisters and the whole process starts over.

Now it was almost evening, and our plan was to hike the last few miles to Agua Caliente, and to camp next to the creek in the dusk. A real creek, with water running over stones! The first one we had seen on the trip so far.

I was flying high on my burger and reached the campsite before the others, climbing high into the beautiful hills and then along the burbling little stream. I soaked my feet in the water, listening to the little noises of the forest. Night came and at last the others arrived, headlamps swinging in the dark. We pitched our tents in the sand and slept.

Day 10: Cheap soda springs and the longest mile

Mileage 10
Mile 91 to mile 101

All day I slept curled on my side beneath the thorny tree. The sun floated overhead, the warm dapples shifted like constelations across my body. Tiny ants crawled over me, using my body as a bridge from one side of the tree to the other. I slept.

In the afternoon we woke and sat groggily in the dirt, heating pots of food over our tiny alcohol fires. It was 6 pm and 9 miles to the next water source, barrel springs. We would camp there, and in the morning hike the 4 miles into Warner Springs. We all had resupply boxes there, waiting for us at the post office. We had also heard that there would be burgers there, and a little store. Burgers, we had said as we hiked. Burgers burgers burgers.

An hour after setting out from our desert oasis we rounded a mountainside and met the cool, damp air from the sea.

“Fuck!” said Angela. “It’s fucking freezing!” It was nearly dark, and big wet clouds raced across the sky. The wind was howling.

A little later we crouched in a fold in the mountain and attempted to cook dinner on our stoves. Thyra and Angela sat on the trail. I poured the last of my fuel into my stove and tried to light it in the wind. I boiled a handful of noodles and added some olive oil and salt. After this I only had a few dried plums left in my food bag, and I would eat them for breakfast.

As we hiked in the dark in the damp cold from the sea the landscape changed, and the shadowy forms of trees and leafy plants began to tangle up the mountainside. I shivered as I hiked, hungry and exhausted. I was ten minutes ahead of the others, walking in the dark with the dim light of my headlamp trained on the trail, and I felt a little spooked. There were noises in the forest here, little crunches and scufflings, creatures lurking in the tangled undergrowth. This was no arid expanse of dust and barrel cactus. This was someplace- there was moisture here, rain sometimes, plants and fog and springs. It was eerie to feel all that activity around me after the empty warmth of the desert.

I hung back and waited for the others.

“It’s creepy here,” I said. “You think we should all hike together?”

“Yes, let’s all hike together,” said Thyra.

A little later we can upon the number 100 made of stones on the side of the trail.

“Mile 100!” Said Thyra. “We’ve reached mile 100!”

“I guess we’re not day hikers anymore,” I said. We all trained our headlamps on the marker and tried to take a picture, but our batteries were dying.

The eerie 100

“Just one more mile to Barrel Springs,” .said Thyra. Thyra and Angela had both bought insoles in Mt. Laguna, from the man in the outfitter there who liked to peddle them to hikers, and today their feet were screaming.

“Ah,” said Thyra, sitting in the dirt and pulling out one of her insoles. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” She pointed to the edge of the insole. “Right here. It feels like knives in my foot.”

“At least it’s just a mile left,” I said. “Since we’ve seen the 100 mile marker.”

“Fuck,” said Thyra, and she began to limp sideways down the trail.

A little while later I rounded a bend and there, in a sandy little wash, was another 100 made of stones.

“What?” Said Thyra, when she came up behind me. “Which 100 is the real 100?” She was having so much foot pain now that she could barely walk at all, and she leaned on her trekking poles like crutches.

A little while later there was another 100, a little one in the grass.

“The longest mile,” said Thyra. “This is the longest mile.”

The dark path curved down into a fold in the mountain and suddenly there were oak trees overhead, grass underfoot, and the sound of bullfrogs. The air smelled of lilacs. We heard the trickling sound of water and then we were in a little clearing, swinging our dim headlamps around at the tents and cowboy campers rolled up like burritos in their bivy sacs.

The spring was water trickling from a pipe into a square stone trough. In the trough floated cans of soda. I plucked a few out- diet lemon soda, big K cola, and looked at them in the beam of my headlamp.

“Soda!” I said. “There’s cheap soda in these springs!” 

We pitched our tents in a little patch of grass and fell inside of them. We hadn’t slept a full night’s sleep in several days, and Angela hadn’t slept at all in the past 24 hours- she’d curled up next to the trail at the last cache and people had woken her over and over throughout the day, saying “where’s the water? Where’s the water?”

It was cold here, and there was no wind. I burrowed deep into my bag, pulling it up over my face. And then I slept harder than I could ever remember sleeping.

Day 9- no sleep til warner springs

Mileage 20.8
Mile 71 to mile 91, plus .8 for the side trail

In the morning we hiked down the mountain and towards the blistering valley. After an hour of hiking we stopped to rest in a dry streambed on the mountainside, where there was shade from a jumble of boulders and the sandy ground was cool. We blearily ate our morning snacks. At 6:30 a.m. it was already brutally hot.

When we reached the valley floor, it was later than we figured. Ben checked his GPS, and it turned out we had miscalculated- it was six miles from where we had camped the the cache. So it would take us longer to cross the baking valley of no shade.

The trail cut across the valley among huge barrel cacti and over dry streambeds. I stared at the ground, following the footprints and the drag marks of trekking poles. I could feel the hot sand through the soles of my trail runners, and there were plenty of awkwardly-shaped rocks to stumble over. After an hour my feet were sore all over, every cell burning in pain. The bright sun reflected off the bright sand, and the backs of my legs were beginning to burn. Around me rose the mountains, shimmering in the heat. In the distance, traffic glimmered on the highway. I plodded and plodded, but it felt as though I got no closer. Why won’t this end, I thought. Why won’t this terrible valley ever end.

The scissors crossing cache was stacked-up cases of gallons of water in the cool sand of the highway underpass. I collapsed on the ground there and desperately pulled off my shoes. Other hikers began to arrive, filthy and sunburnt, and collapsed on the sand around us. It was 9:30 a.m.

I tried to stretch in the cool sand. Someone passed the trail register around. I didn’t look at it, didn’t want to see how many pople were ahead of me. It’s not a race, I’d been telling myself. Not a race not a race not a race. And besides, there were just as many people behind me. I was right in the middle. All that matters, I had told myself, is that you make it to Canada.

There was cell reception under the bridge and news arrived that the day before, on the last day of kickoff, a tree had fallen on five tents. There had been people in the tents. One of them had gotten a concussion. It was an oak tree, and ants had eaten away the base. And several people had arrived from the border that day with heat exhaustion. One of them hadn’t made it farther than Hauser Creek, and had to be air-lifted to a hospital.

The tree that fell at kickoff

“It’s hot,” I said to no-one in particular. “So hot.”

There was bleary talk of an RV resort nearby, with a pool of sorts. After a moment a man arrived and announced that he was offering rides in his truck the three miles to the resport. It was Larry, the man who stocked the cache. Larry was big and burly looking and he bent over the cases of water, gathering the empties, as the neck-shade on his desert hat blew in the wind.

We rode with Larry to the RV resort. For five dollars, he had told us, we could shower there and hang out at the pool. The resort was a handful of RVs on a wild stretch of baking sand. There was a little store and we bought icecream sandwiches and bottles of gatorade and sat at the shaded tables on the deck, deleriously consuming our snacks. 

The icecream sandwiches put me into a coma and I stumbled across the burning sand to the shower house, feeling as though the light was blinding me. The women’s shower house was made of clean white tile and was cool and dim. There was a long row of white sinks. I plugged in my phone and waited a moment, but no-one appeared. I took off my clothes. I peeled the tape off my feet, grimacing at what was underneath. I scrubbed at myself in the shower, attempting to remove the paste of dirt and sunscreen. There was a quarter-sized patch of poison oak on my calf. Not so bad, I thought. Not so bad at all. After showering I filled the end-most sink with hot water and soap, plunging my clothes into it. The next sink became the rinsing sink and in this way I washed my clothes, churning them up and down in the scalding brown water.

I put on my wet shirt and bright yellow shorts (dirt brown, a dirt that would probably never come out again) and stepped gingerly outside in my bare feet, spreading the rest of my clothes on the bright ground to dry.

I found Thyra and Angela and Ben at the pool, which was a rectangle of cold blue water in a baking stone patio. Angela was pulling the bees from the water with a pool skimmer and Ben was standing in the shallow end, wearing all his clothes. There was no shade at the pool so I pulled a decomposing pool lounger into the tiny bathroom there and laid in it, attempting to write blog posts on my phone. My clothes had dried completely on the walk from the other bathrooms.

Outside there was a sliver of shade against the wall that bordered the pool. Ben and Thyra and Angela wedged themselves into this shade, attempting to cook food on their alcohol stoves in the wind. Woo woo woo, went the wind, blowing dust and grit across the stone patio.

We made up a story of why we were walking to Canada.

“I feel like I’m in some sort of post-industrial collapse,” I said.

“We have to find the others,” said Angela. “We’re walking to Canada to find the others.”

At 5:30 Angela and I got a ride from the Swiss woman who worked in the dusty little store. She wore a dress made from a sarong and I imagined her at home, batiking desert landscapes. She’d lived in the valley for twenty-nine years.

“This place really grows on you,” she said.

She took us back to the highway underpass. Ben and Thyra were already there, drinking bud light they’d found in a cooler, with ice.

“Very little ice,” said Thyra.

We had a long climb ahead of us, up into the San Felipe traverse. The shadows were long now and the air was a little cooler. We were night hiking the 14 miles to the next water cache, in order to avoid the heat. Our plan was to hike until 9 p.m., cowboy camp until the moon rose and then hike the last 9 miles. We would reach the “third gate” water cache by dawn.

We had a running joke where we reffered to dawn as “Don”, as in “Don is coming” or “Don will wake us”.

At 2 a.m. the moon rose and woke us at the trampled spot among the cacti where we had landed after dark. The wind had been gusting for hours, howling over the mountaintop, and we had slept restlessly on our groundsheets in the dust. Now we sat up, confused, and stuffed our things away, fighting with the wind for our sleeping bags.

There were two gates before the “third gate” cache, three gates made of metal pipes, stuck in the trail that hugged the side of the mountain. We stumbled forward in the dark, our headlamps trained on the trail. This side of the mountain was in a moonshadow, and it was difficult to see.

“The first gate!” I shouted, when it appeared as if out of nowhere. We had gone five miles. The miles had stretched out somehow, in this dark and sleepless hour, and each one seemed to take hours. At the second gate we sat in the dust and cooked breakfast on our little stoves. The sky was lightening in the east.

“Don is coming,” I said.       

Angela making breakfast at the second gate

Ben and Don

We passed through the third gate and into a little garden of eden, a fragrant stretch of trees and speckled shade. The hot hills we’d been walking through had burned the year before, and there’d been “less shade than usual”. Now we stumbled down the side trail to the water cache, a mound of sparkling bottles in the hot desert. After gathering water we each found a patch of shade in which to curl. I pulled myself beneath the thorny branches of a tree whose name I did not know. There was a space in there just big enough for my body, and I spread out my sleeping pad. I arranged my things around me- water, sunglasses, hat, and a hanky to cover my eyes. I would be safe in here from the sun.

Other hikers were just beginning to arrive. It was 6:30 a.m. I put in my earplugs and slept.

Note: my posts are about three days behind right now. Also thanks for all your nice comments!!

Day 8: The brutal desert is brutal

Mileage 14
Mile 57 to mile 71

Morning in the best campsite ever.

I woke up at dawn in my little campsite among the boulders and shook my water bottle. Empty. I’d been hungry before bed and I’d eaten a sugary bar and a bunch of jerky, and then when the moon had risen like a flashlight in my face I’d been both unable to sleep and terribly thirsty. I had stared at the moon for two hours, thinking anxious thoughts about my dogs, life, the future, everything. And I had drunk all my water.

I sat in my sleeping bag for a moment, looking at the long bands of light reaching over the boulders. Jean Francois passed on the trail below, leaning on his trekking poles, headed out. I yawned and stuffed away my quilt.

Three miles is not so long until you are thirsty and do not have any water. I was overjoyed when I reached the horse trough at the sunrise trailhead; it was glorious to pass the gallon jug that was there through the cool, murky water to the valve that let out clear water. Last night had been my first time dry camping; I was still learning how much water I needed to pack.

I stood drinking my water, looking down at the minnows that swam in the horse trough. How did the minnows get in here? I wondered.

After drinking a liter of water I sat in the dappled shade of a creosote bush beyond the horse trough and ate a breakfast of pepitas and dried figs. I felt sort of bleary and disoriented; it was already hot and I hadn’t slept well. On the other hand, my achilles tendon wasn’t troubling me at all. It seemed as though the surgery I’d done to the back of my shoe had done wonders, along with changing my socks and rest. Hallelujah, I thought.  

After a time I walked back to the trail and there were Angela, Thyra and Ben, piling out of the back of a pickup truck. They’d just come from kickoff, and had gotten a ride from some trail angels. We set off down the dusty path together, the four of us, stumbling a little in the heat. It was eleven o’clock.

In just an hour the sun was directly overhead, it was too hot to walk any longer, and there wasn’t any shade anywhere. We found a patch of sloping dirt next to the trail that was partly shaded by a creosote bush; we wedged ourselves into this dappled shade as best we could and settled in to wait out the hottest part of the day, cramming things beneath us so we wouldn’t slide down the slope into the scorching path. Angela made a pot of instant mashed potatoes; Ben fell asleep, his water bladder with its in-line filter hanging above him like and IV bag.

At 3:30 we were too antsy to wait any longer.

“I’m going out into it,” said Angela, squinting out at the scalding desert. Eight miles away was our next water source, a concrete tank on a fire road. There was a spigot on the tank that sometimes worked; when the spigot was broken one lifted the steel lid from the top of the tank and drew water from the inside. Often hikers forgot to replace the lid and rodents got inside; sometimes there were dead rats floating in the water.

It was now not only brutally hot, bright and shadeless; it was windy too. I clutched my hat as a I walked carefully along the trail that hugged the edge of the mountain, looking with apprehension at the baking valley below. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow we cross that valley.

We reached the water tank at six; the spigot, by a stroke of miraculous luck, was working perfectly. I filled up my bottles and drank; I washed my socks and laid them in the sun; I sat on my sleeping pad in the dirt, cooking a pot of noodles. Other hikers arrived, bleary and sunburnt, and pitched their tents in the clearing next to the tank. While crouched under the creosote bush in the afternoon we had formulated a logistical plan for our desert crossing- we would hike on this evening, and well into the night, until we were tired, and then we would camp. In the morning we would be just a few miles from the huge water cache, known as “scissors crossing” and stocked by trail angels, that was on the other side of that flat and awful desert.

Night hiking, we had decided. Night hiking was the answer.  

The trail leaving the water tank hugged the edge of the mountain, as it would until we dropped down into the valley in the morning. Dark fell, but there was no moon; the moon, which was waning, would not rise until midnight. I switched on my headlamp as the rosy light faded in the west. The big dipper blinked on above me. I was ten minutes ahead of the others, and I could not see their lights; it was just my little light against the dark backdrop of the creosote mountain, and the land falling away to the black valley below. It was a little cooler, now, and I felt the wind in my sails; I hiked quickly, watching the rocks in the path below my feet. I followed the folds of the mountain and after a time I looked back and saw three little lights opposite me, across the deep ravine. I switched my headlamp to its blinking red setting. Blink blink blink, went my headlamp. Blink blink blink, went the little lights across the mountain in the darkness.

We stopped to camp in a dusty clearing next to the trail once we figured we were four miles from scissors crossing.
“We can even sleep in if we want to,” we said. “We can sleep til seven if we want to. Four miles is not so much. Even across that brutal valley.”

The moon rose at midnight and shone again like a flashlight in our faces. I woke and slept, woke and slept.

“It’s so moony!” I wanted to shout, to no-one in particular.

It was hot, and I was sweating in my sleeping bag.

“It’s nighttime and not even cold,” I thought, as I lay in my sleeping bag, staring at the moon. “What does that mean for tomorrow?”

Also! Here are the fantastic blogs of my hiking partners, for more trail reading-

Angela- http://trail-fresh.com

Ben- http://benwalks.blogspot.com

Thyra- http://bearsinthesewoods.blogspot.com

Day 7- The Anza-Borrego Desert of Beauty

Mileage 14
Mile 43 to mile 57

In the morning I sat at the picnic table in our campsite at kickoff and made a pot of oats with chia seeds and dried mango. I had too much food and was trying to offload it; while the oats cooked I piled up things on the picnic table to leave behind- hippy fritos from trader joe’s, an exploded bag of sweet potato chips, the oatmeal. When my breakfast was done I ate it too fast, burning my mouth. But at least my pack was lighter now.

I met my ride by the bathrooms; he was a talkative ranger who was section hiking through the desert. He drove me to Mt. Laguna, which is where I’d gotten off the trail, along with a good-natured german who was sunburnt a bright red. The morning was warm, and my pack was full of water; I set out happily through the dusty pine forest, so glad to be back on the trail I could barely stand it.

An hour later I’d left the pine forest behind. It had been an anomaly in the creosote desert, a little island on the mountaintop where moisture gathered. Now it was only the desert, sweeping away in all directions. To the east, cradled in the mountains, was a wide flat valley; this valley roasted in the sun.
In a few days I would cross this valley.

There would be no shade.

Photo: Just some shadeless desert to traverse.

I’d gone three miles and my ankle was just a little sore. This is promising, I thought, as I took an ibuprofen, seeing as a few days ago it had hurt to walk at all. I’d gone to a talk at kickoff put on by a man who’d healed his brutal shin splints during his thru-hike by changing his gait, and now I tried to imitate the gait I’d seen him do. Short little steps, and walking upright as though a string was coming out of the top of your head. Like ballroom dancing, I’d thought, as I’d watched him mince around the room. Now I held my arms out in front of me as though I was holding a partner, and imagined that I was two-stepping. Immediately my gait changed. My posture went up, my stride shortened, and I could feel the muscles in my legs tense, taking more of the burden. I wasn’t slapping so hard on my heels with each step.

“You’ve got 2600 miles,” the man had said, “to experiment with your gait.”

At mile ten I stopped at a strange empty picnic area next to the highway and filled up my bottles at a horse trough. I was in the desert now; my daily distance and where I rested, cooked and camped would be dictated by the water sources scattered sparsely along the trail. This wooden horse trough was filled with murky green water. I turned on the spigot for the trough and was relieved when clear, cold water came out. The tank for the trough was filled by a fire truck and was often empty; some hikers would have to filter directly from the trough.

After filling my bottles, I dropped my pack on a picnic table in the shade of an oak tree. I did some stretches. My ankle felt fucking fantastic. Thank god, I thought,. Thank god it’s healing. Or rather, thank the angels. The trail angels. I spread my things out on the picnic table, elated. I would cook dinner here, I had decided, and then hike on a few miles to what on the map was labeled as “the campsite among the boulders”. Then, in the morning, I would be only two miles from the next horse trough. And I would meet Angela, Ben and Thyra there, who would just be leaving kickoff.

I boiled water in my little pot on my little popcan stove and added rice noodles, dried vegetables, and freeze-dried beef. I stired in some salt and a spoonful of coconut oil. While I was eating my dinner a man appeared, and sat down opposite me at the table.

His name was Jean Francois, and he was from France. He was sixty years old, and he was thru-hiking the PCT. He’d left Campo two days before. I did the math- he’d been hiking more than twenty miles a day. He took off his hat and scratched his sunburnt scalp. He was wearing a wool beret.

“Made in France,” he said, pushing the beret across the table to me. He’d knotted his “PCT class of 2013″ bandanna around the beret, to protect his neck from the sun. Fumbling into his pack, he pulled out an orange.

“I have not been hungry,” he said. “Maybe just a little hungry.” He peeled the orange slowly, trimming the pith with his pocket knife. He offered a few wedges to me.

Jean Francois and I hiked together into the afternoon. He did not speak much english. We came to a dusty road that looked out over the hot desert valley. There were wilted flowers there, and headstones set into the rock.

“Oh,” I said. “Ashes!”

Jean Francois frowned.

“Do you understand ashes? When people die, they bring the ashes here, and throw them out into the air!” I made a sweeping motion with my arm. I wished I remembered my French from highschool. Now there was only rudimentary Spanish there. Jean Francois frowned harder.

At 6 o’clock we reached a jumble of rose-colored boulders that looked out over everything. Among the boulders were soft flat places in the sand. Jean Francois picked a spot along the trail. “Goodnight, Jean Francois,” I said. I walked back among the boulders and found a spot that was hidden. The sun was setting over the hills to the west; I felt tired, but not overly so. I was not sore anywhere; my feet didn’t even hurt. I am getting strong, I thought. These next few weeks I will take it easy. Slow and steady wins the race.

I spread my groundsheet, which looks like a sheet of saran wrap, over the soft sand, and weighted the corners with hunks of quartz. Then came my two foam pads; one full-length one the thickness of a yoga mat, and a torso-length one with an inch of padding. On top of these went my sleeping quilt, which I’d just discovered I could affix, via straps, to my sleeping pads, shutting out the drafts. I’ll cowboy camp tonight, I thought. No tent for me. I felt safe, I’d realized, way up here under the stars, with the big boulders jumbled all around me. I patted my ground sheet. This is a scorpion no-fly zone, I said, to no-one in particular.

A warm wind was blowing as I tucked myself into my sleeping quilt. Being on the trail is the best thing in the world, I thought, as I watched the stars wink on above me.

Spoiler: my tendonitis heals.