Day 40: Mile 511.0 - 517.6
After a night at the Ostrich Farm where we heard the wind howling in the upper branches, but felt little at ground level in our tents, Runts, Candy Corn and me headed out in the morning. I was planning to continue the Lake Fire closure circumvention, doing a road walk up Pine Canyon Road to Three Points, then following the road to the left all the way to the PCT trailhead at mile 511. Runts and Candy Corn, though, managed to get themselves a hitch to the trailhead (there's a reason for this, but I'll include it in tomorrow's entry) but I wanted to hike this portion, just to maintain graph connectivity.
For my Saturday hikes, there are a couple of ways I find the next hike. Both involve graphing all the hikes I've done on a big map. From there, one way is to look for bits of trail I haven't done yet, then figure out a route that covers that. This leads to planning 15+ mile hikes just to get that final little 1.5-mile connector trail. The other is to try and connect all the hikes I've done so that they form a continuous foot-path, that is, so that the graph is fully connected. That's a big dream, and one I've never managed to achieve, but it's what leads to things like hiking 14 miles of road to get around the Lake Fire closure: it maintains graph connectivity between two sections of trail. To be fair, this is actually stupid: I'll inevitably come back and hike this portion of PCT when it reopens, so I'll get graph connectivity then. Eh, hiking the road was an attempt to fulfill the dream; I didn't say it was a *intelligent* attempt.
As far as road walks go, this one was fine. It started out windy, with the wind blowing into my face, pushing me back, telling me to be sensible and just hitch a ride. But when it realized I was determined, it settled down, and became more cooling than consternating. The road itself was a simple two-lane, with little asphalt past the white lines, but large enough dirt on the shoulder, and little enough traffic on the pavement, that it didn't matter. It was actually pretty germane as far as road walks went: just long, with not much to see besides house after isolated house, with long stretches either natural or, sometimes, grassed, in between. In the beginning part, that natural was obviously burned, with lots of blackened trunks filling the narrow canyon. But that got better the farther I went, and the breeze kept coming through, keeping the heat at bay. All in all, fine for a road walk.
Oh, towards the end of the road walk, about a mile and a half from the trailhead, a random driver called out to me from across the street asking whether I wanted a ride to the trailhead. I think she was even providing a ride to another hiker! But by then I was so close that could taste it, so I inevitably turned down the friendly offer.
So after a road walk of nearly 11 miles to finish circumventing the Lake Fire closure, the hike "proper" began at PCT trailhead, where I immediately stopped to eat breakfast. After that, the trail, headed out, doing the usual dip and weave as it walked down the ankles of the hills to the desert below. More up and down bluffs, walking along the northern edge of these mountains, as to the north, the desert spread a pure yellow, dry and sun-bright, in the midday sun. And even more distinct for me, the mountains behind: shaded in a a deep blue, even in the afternoon, that yielded a striking contrast that I tried to capture with my camera (and likely utterly failed to). This stretch wasn't bad: it was just getting a bit hot (cf the desert *right* *over* *there*), but the distance wasn't that long--just 6.6 miles. The thing was combining that with the road walk and it was a 17-mile day, and that coming right after a couple of 20+ days, and I think the accumulation was starting to get to me.
The hike "proper" was 6.6 miles because that was the distance to Hikertown, where I planned to stop for the day. Hikertown is a series of little old-western-themed cabins beside Highway 138 and right along the trail where many hikers stay. It's a donation of $10 for one of the cabins--which I managed to snag just as someone was leaving--and the cabin's are just a bed and a door. But the wind had been picking up on the last bit of the hike, so I was happy to be behind walls, so I took it.
There's a whole story about Hikertown and pushing to get to it, but I'll talk about that in the next entry.
-- Ostrich Farm > Three Points > Pine Canyon Road > PCT > Hikertown
-- The final bit of the road walk crossed over a little ridge, dropping down into the next canyon. And as soon as I stepped across the top of that ridge, the air changed, from a canyon with a breeze, to a canyon where the heat beat down. Strange how local weather can change so much with just a single step!
-- Today I met Kenny, who was walking his dogs--Bacon and Donut--along the road. Kenny lives in the Lake Hughes area, has for quite some time, and his place was about a mile off from the PCT. So for a while now, he's been "interviewing" PCT hikers as they passed through, posting the videos on Instagram. He started with questions like how did you get your trail name?, and has now evolved to what was your toughest day? He asked me the latter, and I told him about the second day after coming back from the vaccination shot, although I wasn't that articulate about it. Likely gave the wrong impression. Which is not on Kenny: he was a nice enough guy, with plenty of questions, I'm just hit or miss when asked a serious question on the spot, and this time I was a miss. Kenny himself had had a career working for communications firms, mostly on the deployment side, laying cable and optical fiber. He had thought to retire and play golf, but unfortunately his house had burned down in the Lake Fire (there's a video about it on his Instagram). So now he was at a crossroads. Should he rebuild, or maybe this was a chance to do something different. He felt akin to the PCT hikers--the also homeless. Although I pointed out there was a difference: we were so by choice, while he wasn't. But he countered that, regardless, the response could be similar, which was fair. Part of him wanted to hit the road, but he had seen a camper van parked for a few days just down the road and, thought, could I live like that?, and felt the answer was no. Part of him wanted to hike, maybe section hike, but there was hesitation there too. Plus there were the dogs--well-trained, based on his watching of Cesar Milan's techniques--to think about, how would he take care of them on the road? Finally, he had thought about maybe doing something for the PCT hikers: he knew about the Ostrich Farm this year, knew about Casa de Luna in the past, had thought some about whether it would make sense to set up something like that at his place. He queried me some about this last option, and I'm afraid I didn't give him much to go on. Water, campsites, and electricity are what attract hikers, but he'd have to pay for two of those three at least, and doesn't come cheap. In the end, I feel I wasn't able to help Kenny out that much, either in providing insight into his upcoming decisions, nor into myself for his Instagram followers. Too bad, like I said, he seemed a nice enough guy.
-- About two miles before getting into Hikertown, I bumped into Nikki "Laffy Traffy" and Sebastian "Yardsale", a couple from Minnesota hiking the trail, and talked to them some. Turns out Sebastian is pretty involved in the beer business back home: he sells beer-making accessories, he also brews, and finally he's a professional taster. So lots of beer! He laughed that, when he goes to the doctor and the doctor asks, how many drinks do you have a week?, he starts with, well, I have a bunch of drinks every day and starts doing the math. Hey, doc, is it ok that I start drinking at 8am as soon as I get to work? But I thought it interesting that every year his company designates a sober month where they go dry, just to make sure that they can still step away and haven't strayed into alcoholism. I'd actually met them a long time ago, back at the faucet at the bottom of San Jacinto, and again at the Acton KOA, but this was the first time I'd gotten to talk to Sebastian (at least) more extensively. Sebastian's a pretty gregarious fellow, pretty sure-stepped, with just the hint--even though he doesn't have kids--just the hint of that dad sense of humor starting to creep through (which I, for one, actually found quite endearing).
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