Day 15: Mile 164.8 - 175.4
I woke early this morning, but had a lot of blog backlog to fill in, so was late getting out of camp. Often when I write, I can keep it going for maybe 45 minutes, but then I lose momentum and either have to hit the Force button or take a break (and then hit the Force button when I get back). But this morning I could just keep going and going. It was eerie, actually: I didn't want to stop (as you will perhaps discern from the overly loquacious prose), but eventually had to force myself to call it quits and get on trail. A good feeling to be sure, but one that's so rare as to be unsettling.
In the morning, the hiking was tough. Basically after the Fobes Trail junction just a couple of miles away, the trail starts to climb, and climb, and climb. To be fair, looking at the grade, on a Saturday hike I would be able to do this no problem. But today!; maybe it was the pack weight, or maybe it was the elevation, but I did not have it. And I even added two new techniques to my uphill regime: the Kyle Step (which is walking up the hill sideways to activate different muscle groups), and the Break, where I stop and wait for my legs to reenergize (although not too long that they begin to hibernate-recover). But still, it was a long slog. It wasn't too hot--pretty mild for southern California, with a slight breeze--it was just hard, and I was so slow coming into Apache Spring that I had started rationing my water.
At Apache Spring I dumped my pack and headed down to the spring, and switchback path of half a mile but it felt longer. At the bottom, past the campsites, is a little cistern with water trickling out. A very slow water draw, but cold and good. There were three folks already there: Jessica and Anna and Melanie, filtering water and cameling up. I got to chatting with them while pulling my 4+ L (and cameling up myself), then headed back up to finally eat breakfast.
By now it was afternoon and finally getting hot enough to warrant converting to short sleeves and short pants. I did, sunscreened up, and by the time I was ready to go the three of them were as well, so I ended up joining them for the afternoon. They followed Guthooks more extensively than me, and Jessica in particular was quite worried about the infamous Rock Slide coming up. There were ropes, but reports that the ropes were frayed (they weren't, not really), and lots of comments on Guthooks about how sketchy it was. Regardless, it was freaking her out. We stopped about 0.3 miles from the Rock Slide at a campsite, and waited for Anna and Melanie to catch up, then, after some snacks and conversation, headed on up. The Rock Slide was, admittedly, tricky: the first part much worse than the second, the first requiring you to step on some deeply downward slanted rocks (keep tension on the rope and you'll be fine), then to clamber up this high rock shelf (that's the actual tough part). And it's pretty exposed, so I didn't look down. The second part was easier, just a climb up some rocks and then around, but you were looking uphill the entire time so the acrophobia didn't kick in as hard. Melanie went first, then me, then Anna, with Jessica last. But as she was going, some hikers came down from the other direction. They were preparing for a Denali ascent, hiking around San Jacinto for training, and one hopped up on the top of the Rock Slide and helped guide Jessica through it. The voice of God, she would call it afterward, calling down assurances and directions. But she got through it--the toughest portion of the trail yet!--and we continued on.
If the theme yesterday was lizards, the theme today was downed trees, and after the Rock Slide, they became much more frequent. The trail here is a shelf trail--relatively steep slope above, relatively steep slope below--and so with a big fallen tree blocking the trail, we'd look uphill, look downhill, look over, look under, then find a way through. At one, there wasn't anything easier, so we dropped our packs, crawled under in the dirt, then pulled our packs through. My pack was the heaviest, full of water and 6 days of food; theirs were lighter since they were going into Idyllwild tomorrow. As the trail continued going up, the day became more cold and windy with the onset of evening. In theory I could have continued, but I decided to call it quits at the first big campsite: I can do a trail in the dark, but only one I've seen in the light, and I wouldn't want to hazard a downed tree in the dark anyway! I arrived with Melanie, and we waited for Jessica and Anna. I admit I was a bit worried: it was getting dark and was already cold and windy, and I kept watching the trail behind. Finally, a dot of color, on the far slope, coming up the thin line of the trail: ah there they were!
But it was a short day today, which was troublesome, since I only have so much food and it has to last me all the way to Big Bear. (Technically, I can bail at I-10 and go into Banning or Cabazon, but I really don't want to since that'll take at least half a day, and I ultimately want to get to Cleghorn in time.) But I did get to spend it with some nice folks, and get to share the Rock Slide and a bunch of Downed Tree crossings, which was good. If it weren't for the schedule, I'd call it a fine day, and rack up the lower mileage to intelligently managing elevation (no headaches or queasiness yet, but I know I'm prone to altitude sickness). Eh, that's as good an excuse as any!
-- Makeshift campsite > Fobes Junction > Apache Spring > Rock Slide > Campsite
-- Incidentally, on my "hiking up hillsides" trick bag, I feel obliged to mention that, when all else fails, huff and puff. I certainly did that today! Breathing through the nose is an admirable thing but it's little sitting straight at your desk: as a physical trainer told me years ago, yeah, you should sit straight and ergonomic at your desk, and you will when you first sit down, but after a while you'll start to slouch. That's inevitable. And it's ok. Just make sure after, say, an hour you get up and re-sit in the proper way. To my mind there's a whole class of "things you should do" that end up like this; try your best, know you'll fail, and when you do, notice it and fix it, then repeat the whole cycle over again. Sitting, breathing through the nose when climbing: eh, it's fine.
-- In the morning, I set up the tripod to grab a shot of the Palm Springs desert through some rocks, along the trail. Well-framed, basically. Well as I was tripoding the shot, Hungarian Paco came up, saw what I was doing, and asked if I could take a video of him hiking past that same scene. I did, and it came out even better than my own shot (I got to hold his phone up high and get this better angle that included more of the valley below). Man, I almost wanted to ask him to do it again so I could grab a shot with *my* camera!
-- Today I met Jessica and Anna and Melanie, or the JAM as Anna put it. Jessica and Melanie are hiking the PCT together, Anna is joining them for a couple weeks before she heads off to nursing school. Anna grew up in Minnesota, so the heat was getting to her (I felt it fairly mild, all things told, for southern California in the cloudless mountains). But she had all these stories about ice fishing, how to do it (whether to drag the hut out on a sled, or even drive it out on a truck if the ice is thick enough) (10 inches to ice fish, 20 inches to drive a truck) (I think: don't quote me on that and drive your truck into a frozen lake--I might be misremembering the numbers), how to secure the hut (either pile snow around the sides, or some will let you bore pylons into the ice), what kind of fish you could catch (she liked lake trout), what kind of bait to use. She really enjoyed doing that sort of thing, made it sound appealing enough that, by the end, I was thinking, yeah, this "fishing down a hole on a frozen lake inside a heated hut?" This sounds like tremendous fun!
-- Jessica and Melanie were humanitarian workers, working in Iraq. Jessica returned to the States on account of COVID, had been staying up in Oregon, and I got the impression rather liked being home. At the Apache Spring watering hole, the three of them had seen a rattlesnake: no rattle, it just came down to the cistern and runoff to get a drink. But that caused some consternation for Jessica. I tried to make light of it, argued that, see, now that you've seen one, chances are you won't see another, but she quickly put me in my place, arguing that seeing rattlesnakes are statistically independent events, so seeing another is just as likely. She had taken statistics as part of her financial accounting courseload. Well, nuts: too smart for my little psychological reassurances! Jessica was also the most worried about the ropes at the Rock Slide, and wanted to see how they were: too scary and she would have turned around and taken the alternate route. But she got through the Rock Slide, and she got through seeing the rattlesnake (twice--evidently it returned after I'd left), and I get the impression she's gotten through a lot more besides, so I think she'll be fine.
-- Melanie was a fast hiker, and more limber than me: she clambering up and down those downed trees much more readily than me. She also struck me as the one who hiked the most, although I have no good basis for that. Among other things, we talked about how the PCT distorts your sense of geography. Usually when hiking, I have an idea of where this canyon, say, is in relation to that other canyon, but on the PCT, much of that disappeared. We theorized it was because we just had to blindly follow the trail--there was no where else to go--and this dulled our normal location instinct. Which is too bad: knowing canyons and ridges and peaks gives a sense of place and solidity. Without out, I feel I know the trail for sure, but not necessarily the land, and that's a shame.
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