Day 27- Mountaintop-itis

May 17
Mileage 20
Mile 349 to mile 369

I dream it’s raining and I wake in the dark to feel the smallest raindrops on my face. Like a cloud, I think. Like a cloud is falling on me.

“Sour Cream,” I say. “It’s raining.”

Sour Cream sits up in his bag and looks out into the dark.

“It’s just raining a little bit,” I say. “Maybe let’s just keep sleeping.”

“Yeah,” says Sour Cream. “OK.”

In an hour a little light is leaking through the clouds. Dawn. I sit up in my bag and pat it. It’s wet, but not all the way through. It’s barely raining, I think. Like the desert is teasing us.

We get up and pack our damp things away and hike in the cold dawn. We are in the cloud and the cloud is all around us. Next to the trail the land falls away to forever, but we cannot see it. Today we will climb for fourteen miles.

Sour Cream explains to me about quidditch as we walk, the real sport created from the made-up sport in the Harry Potter books. He tells me about shooting a deflated volleyball through hula hoops while running with a broom handle between his legs. His quidditch team, he says, is the second best in all of Canada.

I find a flip flop on the trail. When we reach the cache halfway up the mountain Smiles and Sour Cream are there, sitting in the dirt of the jeep road, playing music on a little speaker. Their sleeping bags are laid out on the grass to dry. The sun has just begun to peak through the fog.

“Did you lose a flip flop?” I say.

“Yes!” Says Smiles.

We cook a meal at the cache on our little alcohol stoves and then hike on. The desert, like it likes to do at high elevation here, turns to beautiful pine forest. Suddenly I am slow, and I feel dizzy, and there is pain in my lungs. Alititude sickness! I think. There isn’t any air in this air!

At one point there is a tarantula, just sitting on a cairn. Is it dying? I ask. It’s missing a leg and it doesn’t seem to care.

The higher we climb and the more beautiful the forest becomes, the sicker I feel. By afternoon we are still climbing and I am naseous, grumpy and sluggish. I trudge along, lifting one foot after the other. I have no idea where Sour Cream is. Mountaintop-itis, I think. I am going to start calling this feeling mountaintop-itis.

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At the summit of the mountain is an eerie ski resort, closed for the season. There is a big, fenced-off resevoir half-full of brackish water, and creepy gondolas are shrouded in fog.

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Now the trail begins to descend, steeply. The trail becomes a sort of ditch filled with rocks, tipping steeply down the mountain.

I am tired and dizzy and irritable and the rocks hurt my feet and I stumble, trying to get faster and faster to the bottom of the mountain. In just a few hours I’ll be in Wrightwood, a little town where I have never been, in a room that Thyra and Angela and Ben, who are already there, have rented. There will be a bed, and a shower, and I will be able to wash my clothes. There will be a store with wonderful wilted produce and cheap deli potato salad. I will lay in a real bed.

I obsess over these things as I descend with my altitude sickness, wanting them more and more and more. When I finally reach the highway Sour Cream is there, sitting in the dirt next to the trail, and I am in an awful mood. How will we get to town? We wonder. Then a woman appears with three huge malamutes and puts us in the windy bed of her pickup truck. I was just walking my dogs, she says.

Wrightwood is a little tourist thing, a couple of shops and restaurants all clustered together next to the highway. People walk along the street and music plays from doorways and cars rush by. Our room is at the Pines Motel, which is right next to everything, because everything is right next to everything. It’s a dim room cobbled together in some sort of trailer painted to look like a cabin, and the inside walls are some thin cardboard-like material painted to look like bricks. Angela and Thyra and Ben are all there, talking loudly, rested and freshly showered, being excited, opening beers. I’ve been listening to nothing but birdsong for days and staring at the trail and I feel suddenly, acutely overwhelmed. The music coming from the street is attacking me, the light is attacking me, everything is attacking me. At the store on the way to the motel I buy strawberries, oranges, a roast chicken and a tub of potato salad. At the motel I drop my things on one of the beds (I have a bed!!) and shut myself in the bathroom. If I can only shower, I think. If I can only shower then I’ll feel alright.

The bathroom is old and dirty and the fixtures are fastened to each other with what looks like toothpaste. I take off my clothes and jump in the shower and fiddle with the nobs. It turn on the hot water and it’s scalding so I turn on the cold and the water becomes freezing. The hot water, it seems, doesn’t work when the cold water is on, and vice versa. Fuck, I think. I’ve never encountered a shower this awful. I’m wet and shivering and I turn on the hot water and the water scalds me. I start to cry a little.

After my terrible shower I climb into the bed and pull the scratchy comforter over my head and cry a little more. The others are laughing and exclaiming but it’s dark and warm under the covers and I just wish I was alone, in a quiet room far away from everything. I want it to be quiet so bad I start to panic and I cry more. Anxiety anxiety anxiety, coursing through me. I hate being in town, I think. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

After a while I come out from under the covers and I feel calmer. I sit on the couch with a blanket around me and eat potato salad and strawberries. Ben is talking about dramatically jumping through the fake brick wall, into the room next door. We should do it all at once, he says. With our arms held out like this. Everyone is hilarious and I laugh. Then it’s time for bed and we pull the janky curtains over the bent and twisted curtain rod. In bed I’m warm and there’s a good down pillow, and after a while I sleep.    

Day 26: The intergalactic space station of cheese burgers

May 16
Mileage 23
Mile 326 to mile 349

I wake before dawn and lie in my sleeping bag, watching the sun rise over the lake. Sour Cream is up and about and then I can see Angela, wriggling like a larvae in her sleeping bag a little ways away. Ben and Thyra are still fast asleep in their tent on the edge of the water.

Dawn at the lake

Angela in her gazebo

Ben, Thyra and Angela are injured, but I am not. I love hiking with them, laughing with them, camping with them. But we’re on a long walk and today, they cannot walk. What is there to do?

In the end Sour Cream and I set out into the mountains, leaving the other three behind. They’ll hitch into Wrightwood on the highway, and once there they’ll rest, buy new shoes, and give their injuries much needed attention. It’s a huge relief to know that they’re taking care of their injuries, and we’ll see them again when we arrive in Wrightwood in two days.

There is a McDonald’s on the PCT. When you are near the McDonald’s there is a trail sign, a regular wooden one, and it says McDonald’s, .4 miles. Today I walk quickly through the desert, knowing that the McDonald’s junction is only 16 miles away. If I can reach McDonald’s by 1 p.m. I can hide there during the hottest part of the day, eating cheeseburgers.

Cheeseburgers. My stomach is upset this morning, and I feel a little naseous while I walk. I had stomach pains in the night that woke me up. I’ve been eating all sorts of crap, gluten and dairy and processed foods and crazy amounts of sugar, things that I know mess up my gut. I need to cut it out so that I can do a good job hiking and finish the trail, but it’s hard. Life!

I won’t get any cheeseburgers, I think as I walk. I’ll get, like, a salad. I try to visualize this salad, to make it more real. But the salad I visualize is like the worst salad imaginable. I imagine myself eating this terrible salad while all my friends eat cheeseburgers. I want to cry.

As I’m thinking about this terrible salad I almost trip over a giant rattlesnake. The snake is big and fat and stretched across the trail, and I don’t notice it until I’m just about to step on it. I catch myself and stumble and jump over it, and then I turn to look at it. it slithers a little and shakes its rattle at me and literally hisses. I walk on a few minutes, saying

“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

And then I throw my pack down in a poky patch of shade and sit on the ground to rest. It’s really hot already. I pull out my gallon bag of trail mix, which is still halfway full, and eat some almonds. A moment later Sour Cream appears.

“I almost stepped on a snake!” He says.

The lake from up in the hills

Sour Cream

We walk through the beautiful dry hills for several hours and then we round a corner and there is a massive freeway in front of us. It is the freeway that runs through the desert between LA and Las Vegas and it is packed with cars going crazy fast.

“I feel like there is a tear in our reality,” I say, “and another reality is leaking through.”  

Then we see the side trail to McDonald’s.

“One o’clock!” I say. “We made it!”

The side trail dumps us onto a paved road that parallels the freeway. It is painfully hot on this road, and the air is thick with exhaust. Up ahead is a McDonald’s and a gas station, and then the desert again, forever and ever and ever.

Smiles and Dr. Slosh are inside the McDonald’s, sitting in a plastic booth, mountains of chicken nuggets before them. I drop my pack and wash my hands and plug my phone into the outlet beneath a huge flatscreen TV that is blaring fake news. There are lots of other people in the McDonald’s, and I stand in line with them. I am sunburnt and my clothes are filthy, but they ignore me. I feel like I am in an intergalactic space station.

I order two double cheeseburgers, a large order of french fries, and some weird lemonade that’s made with fake sugar. Sour Cream gets something similar. Smiles and Dr. Slosh have been eating for hours, and Dr. Slosh glasses the menu board with his binoculars and reports on his progress.

“I’ve eaten three thousand calories,” he says. “Not counting the several liters of coke.”

After finishing my burgers I order a reeses mcflurry, which has something like seven hundred calories. I eat it slowly, staring in horror at the flat-screen TV. Evil-seeming people and incomprehensible, brightly-colored images flash across the screen, accompanied by garbled, too-loud talking. None of it, as far as I can tell, has to do with finding water or navigating mountain ranges on narrow dirt paths. I get up and poke the TV until I find the OFF button.

Fifteen minutes after finishing my icecream I order two more double cheeseburgers. I take the patties out of one burger and add them to the other burger. I give the leftover buns to Sour Cream, and he eats them. I look down at my unwieldy sandwich as I eat it.

“Fuck,” I say after I have finished. “Fuck.”
We leave the McDonald’s in the afternoon and walk back to the PCT, which goes under the highway via an underpass. It’s a wide highway and the underpass is long and dark. Inside, the walls drip with secret water. Then there is a square of light crowded with bright green, like a portal to another world. We emerge through this square into a tangled wood, a clear little brook running through it. We hop across the brook on stones and climb out of this lush, secret green place, back into the desert. As we walk into the dusty hills we look back at the freeway and shake our heads.

How am I ever going to integrate back into the regular world, I think.

I only feel sick for the first two hours of hiking. Eventually I feel a little better, although I can still hear the lemonade sloshing around in my stomach. We drop out of the hills to a little valley and in the middle of the valley is a cache. The cache is 23 miles from Wrightwood, and fourteen of those miles are uphill- our plan is to get water at the cache, walk a few more miles, and then cowboy camp. In the morning we’ll start the long climb up into the mountains.

There are some drunk hikers at the cache, their sleeping bags spread out on plastic lounge chairs. The hikers bought armloads of tallboys at the gas station next to the McDonald’s, and they’ve been drinking all afternoon. We fill up our water bottles and keep hiking.

The trail climbs steeply up the mountain, and there is nowhere flat to camp. At last, at dusk, we find a little grassy patch in a dry streambed filled with boulders. It is just big enough for the two of us, if we spread our sleeping bags in an “L” shape. It’s a little secret spot, hidden from the trail. I drink some water and eat some almonds and brush my teeth, spitting onto the dusty path. We spread out our sleeping mats on the grass- mine just barely fits beneath the thorny, overhanging bushes. I lay under my quilt, feeling as though the mountain is cradling me. I look up at the sky, which is hazy with thin, transparent clouds. I live here, I think. In the nature. I walk on the nature and eat on the nature and sleep on the nature.

I feel safe. I sleep.

Day 25- Rattlesnakes and rootbeer floats

May 14
Mileage 18.2
Mile 307.8 to mile 326

I wake, I eat bits of food with my quilt wrapped around me. My food bag is huge- it must still weigh six pounds. I brought way too much food, I think. It’s so hard to know.

My feet in the morning

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The hot springs in the morning

The hot sun comes out and we hike up the hills above the hotsprings and follow the creek downstream, looking down longingly at all the beautiful turquoise swimming holes. The creek ambles lazily among the boulders, along the little white beaches and under the cottonwoods. We are high above it in the scrubby desert. There are no trails to the swimming holes, no footprints on the little beaches. We are in a sort of wilderness here, and it is wonderful to look down on this wild water. It lifts our spirits. And yet in a way it is an illusion, all of this. It is a little strip of habitat for us to navigate, hidden in the mountains between the sprawling endless cities.

“Where are we?” We had asked some young men in fashionable clothing who had appeared the day before at our swimming hole beneath the bridge. “We walked from Mexico and we don’t know where we are.”

“San Bernadino County,” They had said.

After a few hours we turn a corner and the illusion of wilderness is broken. The hills peter out into a valley cut with roads; in the space below us is a massive concrete spillway. The river dissapears into it.

We walk down to the spillway and across it. It is very hot there, and the dust blows around us. Beyond the spillway the trail dips down to where the remnants of the river are, a little clear water running over a sandy bed cut with jeep tracks.

We cross the clear water and sit to rest on the sand beneath some bushes, where there is a little dappled shade. We fill our water bottles and eat handfuls of things from our food bags.

There is a rustle near Thyra- a giant rattlesnake, making its way through the leaves two feet behind her. We stand up and watch it wind its body into a coil, its little rattler sticking out.

“Why?” says Thyra. “Why when I’m trying to eat my lunch?”   

We’d seen another one earlier in the day, curled up on a rock next to the trail.

Suddenly Angela appears, her thrift-store desert shirt blowing in the wind.

“I had a standoff with a rattlesnake,” she says. “It was across the path and I threw rocks at it, but it wouldn’t move. I finally got around it by climbing up onto the boulders.”

The others want to rest in the shade. It’s still morning, and I want to get farther before the crushing heat of noon, so I set off on my own. I climb up into the hills again and then the trail intersects a road, and I can see a canopy there, and chairs, and some people with packs clustered around.

Trail magic! There is a couple cooking hot dogs on a grill and a plastic table with danishes, cliff bars, and little bags of fritos.

“You want a rootbeer float?” Says the trail angel cooking hotdogs.

“What?” I say. “Are you serious? A rootbeer float? Like, with real icecream? For real?”

The woman puts a scoop of icecream and some rootbeer into a red plastic cup and hands it to me along with a hotdog. I sit in a patio chair and eat the hotdog. I give the bun, soaked with mustard and ketchup, to Sour Cream, who arrived earlier and is sitting in the chair next to me. Sour Cream has been leapfrogging with us for a while, and is our adopted little bro. He’s twenty years old and from Ottawa, and regales us with stories of his mother’s cooking.

I take a drink of my rootbeer float. It’s the best thing I have ever tasted. I eat the icecream and drink the rootbeer and then I’m off again, hiking in the heat over the hills. Sour Cream is staying in the shade of the canopy to wait out the heat, and he’ll meet up with the rest of the gang when they arrive. I just want to get a few miles farther and find a little shady hole to hide in until it’s cool. There’s a stream in four miles and I think I’ll stop there.

The stream is a still pool across the path, halfway between running and dried up for the summer. The water is cool and the bottom is a gelatinous tangle of frog eggs. I dip my bottles in to fill them and then drag my things beneath a scratchy oak tree, into a sandy little patch of shade just big enough for my body. I curl up on my side to nap, but I can’t. Little insects crawl over me, but they don’t bite. I’m part of the desert, I think.

I hear the others pass after a while and I pack up and head out. I find them after a mile or two, sitting on the trail in the slanting light.

“Hey you guys,” I say, but nobody smiles.

They’ve been limping for miles- Ben’s knee is killing him, and Thyra’s foot pain has grown intolerable. Angela’s shoes are too small and her feet have recently turned to hamburger.

They are having a low moment.

We’d planned to make it all the way to a lake before dark, but only Sour Cream and I can walk without excruciating pain. Angela takes off her shoes and puts on her flip flops, and the three of us mince slowly down the trail. Ben and Thyra don’t yet know what they’ll do- they want to sit for a moment in the long light and talk it over. We hike with heavy hearts, hoping they can make it to the lake, hoping everything works out.

The three of us reach the lake at dusk, a big flat water ringed in mountains. The sun is setting over everything. We walk around the lake to a boat-in picnic site with half a dozen little gazebos. Each gazebo has a picnic table. There are no other people; there are no boats on the lake; there is no-one anywhere. Why does it always feel this way? I wonder. Like we’re in some sort of post-industrial collapse? I decide that as thru-hikers, we inhabit a different layer of reality than other people. That’s why we never see other people, while the parks and campground are always empty for us, even in beautiful weather. Why the rest of the world seems so far away.

Sour Cream and I splash into the lake and then clamber out, freezing. We wash our socks in the lake. I pick a bouquet of flowers and stick it in a blue glass budweiser bottle I pull from the spilling-over trash. I put the bottle on one of the picnic tables and then Ben and Thyra arrive and we all cook our dinners around the table in the dark. While we cook there are surprise gusts of wind, and they scatter our food and bits of tin foil across the ground. Angela’s sit pad flies into the lake, and she manages to retrieve it. We laugh uproariously at everything.

When it’s time for bed we each choose a picnic table and spread our sleeping pads on top of it. We even have a gazebo above us, in case of rain. The stars are bright above us and a warm wind is blowing. We sleep.

Day 24: what’s the antonym for disappointment?

May 13
Mileage 22
Mile 286 to mile 307

Waking to another cold pre-dawn, sticking my head out of my bag in the freezing dark, sitting up and eating a few handfuls of things from my gallon bag of trail mix, drinking water, shivering into my hiking clothes. It’ll warm up as soon as the sun hits, I tell myself. It’ll be so hot I won’t be able to stand it.

The forest is cold then suddenly dry and hot and dusty and then Deep Creek appears, tumbling gently through the fold between the hills. We walk alongside it, we hop across it on big round stones. The water is clear and bright in the sun and the plants along its edges are soft and green. In some places it makes deep tea-colored pools. We haven’t seen anything like it yet, this real and persistent body of year-round water- I want to put my whole body in it, I want to lay down beside it on the soft grass and sleep for a hundred years. The Sierras, we keep saying. In the Sierras there will be so much water. We keep walking.

Our plan is to stop in the afternoon where a high footbridge crosses the creek and rest in the heat of the day. We don’t know what to expect- a trickle? A puddle? Will we even be able to reach the water? I walk alone for hours, slowly in the heat, and think about my family. I have deep thoughts about my family. Who is family? These people I am related too, these people I haven’t seen in years. I don’t know anything about them, really. What are they even like? If something happened I wouldn’t even know. But there is some part of me that has thought for so long that someday a relationship will form, as though from smoke, and we will mean something to each other again. Here on the trail now I suddenly know that this isn’t true. I can just let that go, I think as I walk. They’ve let me go so many years ago, I can let them go. I can just let them all go.

We reach the tall footbridge above Deep Creek and scramble down the rocks to a beautiful swimming hole and a little sandy beach hung over with cottonwoods. I’m hot, I think, as I drop my pack onto the sand. I’ve been pushing myself through the heat of the day and I’m flushed and sweaty and covered in dust. I strip off my desert shirt and walk into the creek and dunk myself in the cold water. I move my shirt around in the current and wring it out. I stumble dripping onto the sand and drape my wet shirt on a hot rock and spread out my foam sleeping pad and sit in the sun. I cook a little pot of food and then drag my pad into the shade and curl up on my side with my hat over my face to nap.

It’s 5 pm when Angela and I start to hike again. Ben and Thyra have gone ahead. Our next water source is Deep Creek hot springs, in ten miles. We want to camp before the hot springs- everything in Yogi’s guide says that the hot springs are basically the most awful thing ever.

“Biggest disappointment of the trail,” says the guide. “Gross locals and trash everywhere.”

We pass mile 300. 300 miles, I think. What is distance, what is time?

When we get within a mile of the hot springs it is dusk and Ben and T-Rex are nowhere to be found. Angela and I are tired and our feet are sore.

“I guess we’re camping at the hot springs,” I say, resigned.

We plod on, imagining what the hot springs must be like. We picture a big parking lot, cracked cement pools, soda cans rolling in the wind. Drunk locals and boom boxes and badly pitched tents.

We have been walking along the dusty hills all day, looking down at the ravine where the creek must be. Following it downstream. Now it is dark and the trail looks down at a bright sandy clearing next to the water. We see the light of little headlamps clustered in a pool

“Angela! Carrot!”

It is Thyra’s voice, but where are we? There are no people here, no parking lot, no boom boxes and tents and piles of trash. There is just the white sand, the creek where it pools among the huge boulders, and, apparently, hot springs.

The hots springs pool is deep and clear and lined with smooth stones. It is just the four of us in this magical pool and Smiles and Dr. Slosh, who hand around a plastic soda bottle of wine they have packed in. Above us are the stars.

Our sore bodies melt into the water.

“This is the best thing in the world,” I say.

There is a man there, stoned out of his mind, with a gentle dog named Green, or maybe Queen. The dog stands close to the pool and lets us pet her with our wet hands. There are never any dogs on the trail- we miss dogs in an aching way, animal friends, pets in general. One day we spent an hour talking about hamsters. The dog’s person sits on the edge of the pool, fully clothed, with his feet in the water, and doesn’t speak. Later he will spread his neo-air on the rocks above the pool and in the morning we will pass him, still sleeping, in his bright red sleeping bag.

I emerge from the springs more relaxed than I can ever remember feeling. I stumble barefoot through the sand to the flat spot where I’ve dropped my bag. The spine of something sticks in my heel and I rip it out and look at it. There is a little blood there but I don’t feel any pain, the callus is so thick.

The sand where I spread my sleeping pad is soft and flat and warm. There is the warm air and the sound of crickets and the burbling stream. Tomorrow we’ll do another twenty miles, along the Mojave river and beyond into something I can’t even imagine. And on and on and on, I think, forever.

    

Day 23: wherein I find my stride

May 12
Mileage 20
Mile 266 to mile 286

I woke in our basement hostel room before the others and sat in a corner in the dark, trying to work on my blog. The sun rose and light came in the little window and the others stirred and I remembered the yogurt I had, and the roast chicken, and the cherry chia kombucha, and I was filled with happiness. I sat on the floor in front of the little fridge eating my breakfast as everyone got ready for the day.

The trail angel Aloha, kind man that he is, shuttled us to the post office. Toyo was there, sitting in the little patch of grass next to the post office, his boxes spread around him. Toyo! We picked up our resupply boxes and sat there too, picking through our things as the locals eyed us curiously. Which objects? Which objects to bring on this next 104 mile stretch?

Toyo was bouncing his tent rainfly up ahead.

(Bouncing means mailing gear ahead of yourself so you can pick it up in another town.)

“What’s the weather going to be?” He asked.

“Sunny, I think,” said Ben.

Toyo nodded to himself as he stuffed his rainfly into his bounce box.

Angela and I walked to the gas station next door to get fuel for our alcohol stoves and I bought a reeses peanut butter cup ice cream bar. I sorted through the food I’d shipped myself (prunes, dried figs, almonds, freeze dried beef, dried vegetables, dried mango…) and ate it as it softened in the hot sun. It tasted better than anything in the world but I told myself that really, I needed to stop eating dairy. I can’t tolerate dairy very well and when I eat it every day it really upsets my digestion in ways I won’t go into here, gentle reader. And when that happens while backpacking… it’s really unpleasant and sort of stressful.

“I have to stop eating dairy,” I said to myself as I ate the most delicious peanut butter icecream bar ever. “I have to stop.”

But how? The hiker hunger has turned icecream into the most pleasurable narcotic on the face of the earth. But I can’t just be sick my whole hike…

We got to the hot trailhead at 11:30 and immediately had to take a break to drink water and adjust all of our clothing. My goal was to hike twenty miles, to a water source somewhere on the other side of a bunch of ambiguous contour lines. After a few hours of hiking I happened upon Rafiki, a thru-hiker from Fairbanks, Alaska, eating some snacks with a few other hikers, and I stopped and sat with them for a while. I learned that Rafiki is an archaeologist, and that she has 14 dogs.

“One of them is a house dog,” she said. To train for the PCT she’d pulled a sled across the snow for 50 miles in one day.

I ate one of my payday bars and immediately felt sick. I looked at all the dairy in the ingredients. Why? I thought. Why did I buy these? I couldn’t remember.

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I hiked on and in a few more hours happened upon T-Rex, Ben and Angela sprawled out in a little meadow, taking a break with Smiles and Dr. Slosh. Smiles had gone to the same tiny highschool as Ben, and Dr. Slosh is an ornithologist who works for the forest service.

“We’ve passed through three distinct dialects of the mountain chickadee,” said Dr. Slosh.

“What is that bird here that literally says ‘Tweet tweet tweet’?” I asked him.

“A black capped chickadee, I think,” he said.

T-Rex, Ben and Angela’s feet

I rounded a bend a little later and the soft pine forest turned to a burn- mountains upon mountains stretching away, stuck all over with the blackened spikes of trees, berry bushes crowding the undergrowth. The light was long and spilling over everything. Suddenly a lizard darted up a tree trunk in front of me, puffed out its bright blue belly, and started doing pushups.  

I have to admit, I was a little intimidated.

This is not my home bioregion, I thought. I don’t know what sorts of special powers these plants and animals have.

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The sun began to set and I walked faster, faster, still faster still. The path was soft and gently graded and I didn’t hurt anywhere. The burned forest was eerily still and at moments I felt as though something was following me. I would whip around but of course, nothing was there. It was just me, alone in the beautiful dusk, my friends a few mountain folds behind me.

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The sun quivered like an egg yolk as it set behind the mountains. I turned on my headlamp for the last half hour of the hike. The trail dipped into a little valley and I heard voices and saw the lights of other headlamps.

“Hello?” I called, and someone called back. “Hello!” The camp was an old horse camp- a metal corral and a picnic table, glorious thing. A clear little brook ran through the grass nearby.

I sat at the picnic table and assembled my dinner as the other hikers began to arrive. It was 8:30- I had walked 20 miles in 9 hours, including a one hour break. And I wasn’t even in any pain!

I happily stirred my pot of food, feeling like a little animal who lives in the forest.

I live here, I thought. I live here now.

Day 22- A nero in Big Bear

May 11
Mileage 10
Mile 256 to mile 266

All night at the campsite by the water it was cold and my knees ached, and I couldn’t get comfortable. The pain woke me up, an aching burn radiating from my knees down my calves and into my feet. I lay curled on my sleeping pad on the hard ground, my quilt pulled over my head to keep out the drafts. Why can’t I sleep, I thought. And when will my joints adjust. When will the aching stop. 

Dawn came but it was freezing so I kept the quilt up over my head. I heard the swishing sound of hikers passing me on the trail, so many hikers headed the last ten miles to Big Bear. By the time I was up and packed and ready to go it was seven thirty. The campsite was empty- everyone had left. Angela poked her head out of her sleeping bag. She looked confused.

“It was so cold last night,” she said.

I drank some water and then I had half a liter left. In my bleary morning state I’d read that there was a cache a mile down the trail; of course I looked again after setting out and there was no cache until the road. Ten miles on a liter of water, I thought, as the sun broke over the hills where I was hiking and the air became burning hot and there was no shade. Why do I do this to myself.

Thirst powered me to the road in three hours. There was a cache there with water, squirt, and beer. There was a rotted couch cushion in the shade. I sat happily on the cushion drinking my squirt and waited for Angela, who appeared a moment later. We walked to the highway curb but didn’t have to hitchhike- a man pulled up and popped the trunk on his rental car. Inside was a case of gatorade and a big bag of mini snickers bars.

His name was Timmer, and he was shuttling hikers into Big Bear, just because.

“You can put your bags in the back,” He said. “You want some snickers?”

“Really?” I said. “I can eat these snickers?” All I’d had for breakfast was four slices of salami, the last of my food. And then I had hiked ten miles.

I sat in the front seat and ate three mini snickers. Timmer handed me a bag of a peanut m&m’s and I ate some of those too. Food, I thought. Everything is food.

Timmer dropped us off at the hostel and we dropped our packs on the deck. There were hikers everywhere, and bright light, and the sound of rushing traffic. I felt overwhelmed and panicky and my blood sugar was desperately low.

Thyra texted and said that she and Ben were at a breakfast restaurant down the road. We didn’t know where it was or how far and we started walking down a broad boulevard, the cars rushing past us, our dirty clothes blowing in the wind. We could almost feel the heat of the concrete through our shoes.

We walked for so long it seemed impossible that we would ever reach the restaurant. At last we saw it in the distance and the small figures of Ben and Thyra, leaving.

“You’re leaving?” I said when we reached them. “But we just got here.” Inside the greasy spoon it was insufferably hot and I looked sadly at the menu.

“I don’t even want breakfast food,” I said.

Nothing was right and there weren’t any answers. The waitress appeared and set down plastic tumblers of ice water. She had many nineties piercings and was wearing blue eyeshadow layered over sparkly purple eyeshadow. I ordered a massive, greasy plate of eggs and hashbrowns and bacon. Angela got eggs and hashbrowns and corned beef hash, which I couldn’t conceptualize. My eggs tasted like liquid, my bacon tasted like salt, and my hashbrowns were crispy and perfect. Afterwards I felt ill, but at least I was no longer hungry.

We walked back to the hostel and carted our things to the basement room the four of us would share. It was cold and musty and lit by an overhead bank of florescent lights. There were two sets of bunkbeds. In the bathroom I took off all of my clothes and was astounded by how dirty I was. When I was in the nature I didn’t feel dirty, I just felt kind of like everything else around me. Now I saw that every exposed pore was filled with dirt. And sunburnt too.

I did my laundry in the tub, rinsing it and rinsing it and rinsing it, but the water never ran clear. I hung it to dry on the curtain rod above the open window in our room. Outside was the constant dripping noise of a leaking sprinkler, and you could see the feet of people sitting on the patio.

Another trail angel named Aloha gave us a ride to the big supermarket in town. It was massive and strangely arranged, like a labyrinth. We wandered around, disoriented, touching things and putting them in baskets. For some reason I bought a bunch of payday bars. I like these, was the thought that went through my head.

Back at the hostel a raging party was beginning to be underway. We hid in our room. Through the walls we could hear the sounds of drinking and disordered shouting.

“Is the door locked?” Said Ben. “Can you lock the door?”

We were leaving in the morning to start the next section- 103 miles from Big Bear to Wrightwood. I had proposed my plan to the others.

“I want to hike twenty mile days,” I’d said. “I want to do the section in five days.” I felt like I was ready.

“Ok,” they had said.

Angela and I had bought a roast chicken at the store, and some lettuce, and avocados and cilantro and cucumber and lime. We made giant salads and ate them, sitting cross-legged on the floor of our room. I also ate an entire big container of goat yogurt and a small tub of potato salad. And some celery.

I spread my food for the next section out on the floor. I was tired of running out on the last day, and this time I was bringing extra. My food bag was crazy heavy- would it be way too much? It was so hard to know.

That night, in my nice soft bed, I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that the longer I spent on the trail, the harder it was to come into town. All of it filled me with anxiety now, more so than ever- the people, the pavement, the constant sounds, the overhead lighting. Now in the dark room everyone was asleep but me, snoring and then not snoring.

Whatever am I going to do with myself, I thought.

Day 21- sad grizzlies and a very good beer

May 11
Mileage 21
Mile 235 to mile 256

Someone’s alarm went off at 5 a.m. and I pulled myself up in my bag. It was dark and the crickets were doing their thing. I ate some dark chocolate and my last piece of jerky and then stepped carefully across the pokey ground to pee on the trail.

“I’m claiming this trail for humans,” I’d said to Angela the night before, when I’d peed in that very spot.

It was cold when we started hiking but the moment the sun breached the hills and touched us we were hot. I took off all my layers and climbed up, up, up, out of the scrubby sandy desert and into the beatiful cool fragrant pine forest. I stopped to rest and fill my water at a stream with Ben and Angela and T-rex. I ate the last of the almonds in my trail mix.

“Only the prunes remain,” I said, displaying what was left in my gallon ziploc bag.

We decided that was the name of Ben’s metal band. “Only the prunes remain.”

Thyra and Angela were talking about the summer they’d spent working at a camp in rural Maine for the children of the very wealthy. Eddie Murphy’s son had been there.

“I don’t want to watch shrek,” he’d said. “My dad is the gay-ass donkey.” Then they’d gone to the mall and he’d spent seven thousand dollars on shoes. Another girl had had her horse flown in from france so that she didn’t have to use the camp horse.

“What’s airport security?” Another girl had asked. She’d only flown in her family’s private jet.

“Wow,” I said.

Thyra was mixing instant coffee with stream water in a plastic soda bottle. I cooked a pot of vegetable soup and rummaged around in my food bag. I only had some dried mango and a few spoonfuls of peanut butter left, and a salami; I figured I’d save the salami for the morning, for the final ten mile hike into Big Bear.

A hiker appeared at the stream and removed his cap. Toyo! It was Toyo! Toyo sat carefully on a rock and rested his pack against his legs. I offered him some dried mango, which he accepted with much enthusiasm. After a while he hiked on.

“He looks like he’s eighteen,” said Thyra of the seventy-one year old. “He looks like he’s eighteen years old.”

We climbed and climbed. I ended up walking alone for most of the day, feeling a little sick from the altitude. Then the trail crossed a road and there were the animal cages- I’d read about them in a few of the PCT guides but still I wasn’t prepared. Rectangular chain-link cages the size of a bedroom, with no protection from the sun. A grizzly bear pacing, another grizzly bear standing perfectly still, head hanging in the heat. I set my pack on the ground and looked at them. Grizzly bear pacing, grizzly bear hanging his head in the heat. No people anywhere, no caregivers, no stimulation, no interaction. Two big strong animals, driven insane by sensory deprivation and neglect. These were animals that had been in movies. Now they were “retired”. I could feel their suffering, like a palpable sensation in my own body.

I have to get away from here, I thought.

A little while later I reached a cache. The cache was a cluster of coolers in a little trampled area that overlooked a ravine. Inside the coolers was mountain dew, pepsi, pabst blue ribbon. We were getting close to Big Bear, and all the lodging establishments were competing for the hiker traffic. The names of the motels, hostels and trail angels were scrawled on the sides of the coolers. I put a pabst blue ribbon in the mesh pocket of my pack.

A mile later was another soda cache. Next to the cache was an overstuffed recliner that someone had hauled onto the mountaintop. More motels and trail angels competing for the hikers.

We had planned to camp at a little campground down the mountain a bit where there was water. It was getting towards dusk and I walked quickly, running a little on the downhills. I was imagining the food in big bear, thinking of all the things I could eat. A giant salad, I had decided. A giant salad with, like, a roast chicken on it.

I got to camp before the others and sat at the picnic table in the dusk with my quilt wrapped around me, drinking the pabst. There is nothing more glorious, when you are thru-hiking, than a picnic table. Except maybe sitting at a picnic table by yourself in the dusk drinking a cheap beer after walking 21 miles.

T-Rex and Ben and Angela arrived.

“That wasn’t bad,” said T-Rex.

“Twenty-one miles!” I said. “Bam! NBD!”

Other hikers trickled in and Angela and I wandered to the edge of camp and spread our groundsheets in the dirt. Ben and T-Rex set up their tent.

“My feet don’t even hurt,” I said to Angela. “I can’t believe it.” It was cold, and I pulled my sleeping bag up over my head. I slept.

Day 20- our first swim!

May 10th
Mileage 16.5
Mile 218.6 to mile 235

In the morning we hiked slowly up the canyon, following the little stream to its source. The clouds blew over and the sun burst through; suddenly we were on top of the hills looking down at the canyon and it was very, very hot. The path was steep and there was no shade. I hiked fast because I only had a little water; I stared at the ground and moved my legs. I am finding my stride, I thought. I am getting faster.

The dusty trail switchbacked down the hills and then, at the bottom, there was a little stream. The stream was clear and the rocks in it were yellow, and it made a burbling sound. A few oaks bent over the stream, making a little shade.

I’m in heaven! I said.

Thyra appeared and we both sat in the water. It was cold and maybe eight inches deep but if we laid all the way down the water would mostly go over us. We turned around in the stream until we were soaked and then the others arrived. I washed my socks and laid them to dry on a rock.

We made lunch in the patch of dappled shade beneath the oak tree. Another hiker named Brian arrived and announced that it was nearly a hundred degrees. He had some tilapia in a ziploc bag that he’d marinated in tumeric and dried and he gave us chunks of it to eat.
“Tumeric is an anti-imflamatory,” he said.

In the afternoon we climbed up the hills again and into a burn. It was still hot and the sun was still bright; I stopped to rest in the shade of a huge boulder and Ben joined me. A moment later Thyra appeard. Thyra has these little straps on her pack that are like slings; a place for your arms to go while you hike. Thyra had her hands in these slings and it gave her the look of having tiny dinosaur arms.

“T-Rex!” I said, and then Thyra had a trail name.

T-Rex stopped to rest with us and handed around a bag of reeses pieces that had melted into an unattractive mass. It was weird, seeing the little insides burst from their candy shells.

“The sensations are all out of order,” I said.

Water was sparse. We were using all sorts of apps and bits of paper to figure out where the water was- the water report, guthook, halfmile’s maps, yogi’s notes. Today they were all wrong. At dusk we found ourselves looking for a place to camp, almost out of water. There was a stream nearby but we couldn’t seem to reach it, no matter how far we walked- or maybe we were just tired from the long day of climbing in the sun. At last we turned a corner and there in a gully was a spring that burbled up from the sand. Above the spring was a flat space to camp. There was already a tent there. Then the flap unzipped and a little head poked out. Toyo! It was Toyo.

We spread out our things in camp and sat on the ground, eating bits of food. We were all running low on food; I squeezed nutella onto a few graham crackers; Ben made instant cheesecake in a plastic bag. Somehow I had eaten a four-pound bag of trail mix in two days, and the others seemed to have been living on bars alone. In two days we would be in Big Bear, where we would resupply.

It was dark now, and cold. I brushed my teeth and spat into the leaves. The stars were out and all the hikerrs were bedded down in their little burritos. I crawled into my own sleeping bag and pulled it up over me. I am happy, I thought.

  

Day 19: Crossing the windy valley of the dark lord and the San Gorgonio Wilderness of Beauty

May 9th
Mileage 13.5
Mile 205.8 to mile 218.6 plus .5 mile side trail

In the morning we met Ben and Thyra at the fountain and we all began the long slog across the windy valley of the dark lord. The sky was bright and hazy, the sand was hot, and the wind turbines churned eerily on the hilltops. We crossed beneath powerlines and through strange construction projects; in the distance was a highway.

Sometimes in the deep sand the trail was lost; when this happens the people in front make lines with their trekking poles like this:

We reached an underpass and in the deep shade were coolers of soda and beer; we sat in the dirt and drank 7up and then slogged on through the sand.

The cache

In a few miles we reached a little sign- Trail angels ahead! It said. We followed a short side trail to a tall white fence and into the backyard of a little house; there were carpets stretched across the ground, and canopies for shade, and a tall man with beautiful blonde hair named Cool Ranch appeared with a bucket of hot water and poured us epsom salt foot baths which, he said, we were required to take.

I felt alarmed by this, these mandatory footbaths. Relax, Carrot, I said to myself. It’s just a footbath.

We sat in lawn chairs with our feet in the water and other hikers began to arrive. I took a shower, I dug through the hiker box, I ate a snickers bar and two chocolate pudding cups and made a little pot of food. There was a burger king run and I ate a large order of french fries. I washed my laundry in the sink on the side of the house. Overhead the sky curdled into thunderstorms and a little rain fell. In the afternoon we packed up our things and set out again towards the foot of the mountains.

We were inching up into a dry and dusty canyon; we stopped to rest at a rusty wire fence and ate reeses pieces and then we slogged on. I could see Ben up ahead on top of the ridge, backlit with light. What’s up there? I thought. What’s beyond this strange place?

.

I reached the top of the ridge and saw that the haze was gone; beyond the ridge clear yellow sun shone down on mountains the color of old velvet. We had gone beyond the wind turbines, the dusty valley; we were in some sort of wilderness now, some secret place beyond everything. The San Gorgonio Wilderness! Said a little wooden sign.

.

.

.

We walked over the foothills and down into a wide white riverbed; a burbling stream wound through the riverbed and its banks were crowded with green plants and the air smelled of flowers. The canyon rose up on both sides of us; Ben pointed at some bighorn sheep, but I couldn’t see them. The light was doing crazy things where the sun was setting at the end of the canyon- What is this place? I thought. What is this magical place.

We reached a cluster of small buildings that once was a trout hatchery but was now a preservation center of sorts; we camped in a sort of park with picnic tables off to one side of it. There were no people anywhere and the animals were all around us, watching from the edges; frogs croaked and rabbits darted everywhere and Ben and Thyra saw a bobcat on the trail- and in the morning two other hikers would tell us that a bunch of coyotes had come sniffing around their tent in the night.

Dark fell and it started to rain. I set up my shelter and set my pack in the dry sand beneath a giant oak tree. Angela, who’d been hiking at the back of the group, hadn’t arrived yet- Ben and I went out onto the dark riverbed to look for her. She appeared suddenly, exhausted- she’d missed the turn for the campsite and walked an extra two miles on the trail and she’d had to backtrack in the dark.

“You got here fast!” I said.

“I ran,” Said Angela.

I climbed into my tent to sleep and found that it was full of ants. They crawled across the mesh and the walls; I tried to kill them with my hanky but they were everywhere; I would kill a bunch and more appear. They smelled like floor cleaner when I crushed them.

Finally I gave up. I am going to go to sleep, I said to myself, and I am going to pretend that there are no ants. I turned off my headlamp and began to drift off; I turned it back on and the ants were gone. I lifted up my shoe, my water bottle, and there they were- hiding. Sleeping or being dormant or whatever it is that ants do.

“Goodnight ants,” I said. 
 

Day 18: The two sides of the mountain

May 8th
Mileage 22
Mile 183.5 to mile 205.7

It was one of the coldest nights we’d had on the trail. Twenty something degrees- and in the morning we shivered from our sleeping bags and sat eating bits of food with numb fingers, staring out at the frozen world.

We hiked in our down jackets, our feet crunching on the frozen trail. The sun rose and the light shot through the ice that clung to the trees. In a few hours we’d begin our great descent, through a fourteen mile waterless section that was usually so hot that several hikers had had to be airlifted off of it in 2012. But right now the mountain was covered in a bit of snow and there was water trickling everywhere- it was hard to imagine the desert.

I stopped to get water at a burbling stream and sat in a patch of sunlight, eating my pepitas. I’d decided, after the first week, that pepitas tasted disgusting- sort of like woodchips and then every now and then you’d get one that tasted like mold. But I’d sent a pound of them to myself in every resupply box, and they were one of the highest protein foods I had. So I’d suffered through, and then in Idyllwild I’d discovered something that turned them from a pulpy burden into an exciting trailsnack that I just couldn’t wait to eat-

Reeses pieces!

I only got a liter of water at the stream. There was another stream in a few miles, in a little meadow next to a dirt parking area, and although the stream was seasonal I figured that today of all days, with the melting snow everywhere, it would have water. I would fill up there for the long descent to the desert floor.

The clusters of pine needles on the trees were each encased in a block of ice the size of a stick of butter, and as I walked the sun hit them and they began to fall, all at once and in unison. It became a bit like a video game, as I darted along the trail attempting to avoid the things that were crashing from the sky. I put on my wide-brimmed hat and laughed out loud.

I got to the dirt parking area and Angela, Thyra and Ben were there, their things spread out across the picnic tables. They were cooking food and attempting to dry their sleeping bags, which were damp from condensation the night before. I took my bottles and walked through the woods to the little meadow where the stream would be. The stream was dry- just a patch of brittle grass surrounded by wilted tufts of white flowers. The next water source was fourteen miles away- a drinking fountain, of all things, at the very bottom of the mountain.

Well, I thought. Well.

On the ground beneath the pine trees were the mounds of ice chunks that had fallen from the needles. I crouched down and broke up this ice with my fist, stuffing it into my bottles. I felt happy and resourceful. In fact, I’d woken up that morning feeling incredible- and now the idea of hiking fourteen miles on not much water seemed more like an adventure and a challenge than anything else.

I filled one plastic gatorade bottle, shaking it as I did to compact the ice. Then I added the last of the liquid water that I had- about a half liter- and it filled in the spaces in the ice until the bottle was full. So that means that a liter of crushed ice makes about a half a liter of water, I thought. Maybe a little less because the ice will lose volume as it melts.

I filled my other gatorade bottle with crushed ice. (Side note- thru hikers love gatorade bottles. They are wide-mouthed and nearly indestructible and about a pound lighter than nalgenes.) Now I would have about a liter and a half of water, once everything was melted and accounted for. A liter and a half for fourteen miles. I smiled to myself, excited for some reason. I usually carry a ton of water, way more than anyone else. I had been wanting to get over my fear of not carrying enough water, and today the odds were in my favor- it was cool and overcast, and the trail was downhill all the way. I can totally do this, I thought. No problem.

I didn’t wait for the others, who had filled up at the last stream and had more water. I had to get to the bottom of the mountain, and I had to do it fast. A few minutes after leaving the dirt parking area the trail turned a corner and suddenly the pine forest was gone- I was in a burned desert again, the path strewn with rocks, and I could see the mountain falling away, all the way down to a flat dusty valley. On the other side of the valley were mountains, partly obscured by smog. Rows of wind turbines marched across the valley floor. As I walked I imagined that I was leaving the enchanted mountains and descending into the windy valley of a dark lord. 

.

The trail was nicely graded if stuck all over with rocks and I was walking quickly, feeling good. Now and then I stopped to take a sip of my water. One bottle had dirt and bits of sand mixed in with the snow, and the other had pine needles and tiny cones, and tasted like pine needle soup. They were both gross in their own way and I alternated back and forth, keeping the weight in my pack balanced. I thought about things that made me happy as I raced down the switchbacks. I thanked the universe for the clouds, for the fact that we had braved the storm and caught the nice cool edge of it on what would have been a hot, hellish descent. I didn’t see any other hikers- I didn’t see anyone at all for hours. As I descended the rocks turned to huge, rust-colored boulders, arranged as though there had been a great avalanche of them and then, suddenly, time had been frozen. Some of the boulders looked like faces, or strange animals, or huge clamshells. There were little caves tucked between them, tiny dark spaces of mystery. And in the limestone ones were little bowl-shaped holes, made by the native peoples grinding seeds and things over thousands and thousands of years. The desert here is magical, I thought. The desert here is magical for sure.

After several hours I passed a Japanese man mincing slowly down the mountain. His name was Toyo, and he was seventy-one years old, and he was thru-hiking.

“Only eight more miles to water,” I said to him as I passed.

“Eight?” He said. “Eight more miles to water?”

“Maybe six,” I said.

“Maybe six,” I heard him repeat as I passed.

A moment later I reached mile 200. I thought about how hard that first 100 miles had been, what a journey it had seemed. This second hundred miles, I felt, had past by comparison- by god, I thought. I am getting better at this.

As I walked my feet began to hurt, my knees, my tendonitis. Long descents, especially on rocky trail, are brutal on the body. I took some ibuprofen. Gotta make it down this mountain, I thought. Just gotta make it off the mountain. I was thirsty but I was rationing my water, taking little sips whenever I wanted, and it wasn’t uncomfortable yet.

Five miles before the water fountain I felt myself slowing down. I was trying to stay focused on the trail but I kept getting distracted- staring off at the windmills, wondering about the rocks, looking at the bright beetles on the path. Stop and rest, my body was saying. Take a break for a little while. Today would be a twenty-two mile day- my longest yet. I was tired and thirsty and my feet and joints were screaming at me in pain, even through the ibuprofen. I had about an inch of water left in my bottles.

No breaks, I said to myself. Just walk, Carrot. Walk as fast as you can.

The last three miles were like pushing through molasses- my body wanted to slow down so bad, to stop, to lie in the shade next to a rock. But I needed to get to that water fountain, and fast. I began to have a bit of a spiritual experience.

You’re already at the water fountain, I told myself. All this has already happened. Your whole life has already happened. There is no time, and yet isn’t it incredible to be here, on this dusty trail, in this body in May of 2013?

I felt lonely, and I wanted someone to talk to. I wondered how far the others were behind me. I stopped to pee and just then there was another hiker, rounding the bend. I slung my pack onto my back and then he was right next to me.

“How’s it going?” I said.

“Just chillin,” he said. “Trying to get down off this mountain.” He had trekking poles and the smallest pack I’d ever seen. He was wearing a button down shirt and long desert pants. He passed me and raced on along the trail, his poles clack clack clacking. He’s so fast! I thought. I decided to try and keep up with him. I wanted to talk to him, to ask him if he’d hiked all the way from Idyllwild today. To ask him if he was slackpacking, and if not, how he got his pack so small. (Slackpacking is where you drop off most of your gear at your destination and then hitch back and cross the mountain with just a couple of things.)

I walked as fast as I could, but each time I rounded a bend he was farther away. No! I thought. Come back! And then he was gone, this mysterious speedy person, and it was just me, alone in the desert again. 

The wind picked up in the last two miles to the fountain, adding another challenge to my walk. I clutched my hat, terrified to lose it, and stumbled forward, trying not to be blown off the trail. Walk, Carrot, I thought. Walk walk walk. The valley was close now, the eerily churning windmills, the smog and the hazy mountains in the distance. And then I turned a corner and I could see the fountain below me, and the tiny figures of three hikers clustered around it, their shirts flapping in the wind. One of them, I knew, was the speedy hiker. Wait for me! I thought. In that moment I felt as though he was a sage, some sort of oracle- as though he would have all the answers I sought.

And then I was at the fountain, and I was holding my bottle up to the little nozzle, and the wind was spraying the arc of water all over the desert, making it hilariously difficult to fill my bottle. And then I sat in the dirt and quietly drank a liter of water, and spread out my sleeping pad to stretch. I texted the others. Will you make it to the fountain? I asked. Are you camping down here or on the mountain?

Just the water fountain and the mountains we just crossed, NBD

I got a text back- Ben and Thyra were camping a mile back- they’d found a cache hidden at the dirt parking area after I’d left, and they had plenty of water and they were tired. Angela, though, would make it. It was dusk, and I sat on my sleeping pad and washed my feet with a little water and my hanky. Then Angela appeared, windblown and practically limping, and we walked a little ways to a flat spot and spread our groundsheets in the sand.

Bedtime

It was warm, and the stars came out, and the little red lights of the windmills blinked across the valley. We made little pots of food and ate them, and then we went to sleep, warm in our bags in the endless desert.