(Sunday June 8, 2008)
Right now I'm laying in my sleeping bag near Bullfrog Lake watching these thin wispy clouds float over the ridgeline and turn from light yellow to an orange-gold.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Eat It Pocahontas
(Tuesday June 3, 2008)
Nobody else on the porch really understood the horrendousness of it, but this morning I had to witness the most awful track practice in recent memory. Actually, I never got to witness the St. Joe's women's team playing soccer so this would be the worst practice I've ever seen.
There were two guys and one girl actually giving an effort and running. The rest (who would be barred from even signing up for my team if I were the coach and who would all have been summarily beheaded if I witnessed what I'm about to describe) were walking downhill and frying the brain cells of all in earshot with a rousing rendition of the theme song from Pocahontas.
And of course when I hiked out the next day, you can imagine what song was stuck in my head. I tried asking the grinning bobcat why he grinned, but he just hissed at me. And I think we're a bit too early on the trail to hear wolves crying. But I'm fucked if I need to know what a blue corn moon is or when and where it rises. The wind has no colors to paint witth that I'm aware of, but I will say that I have heard the voices of the mountain.
I told you about that time I thought I heard two people having a conversation above me but I climbed up and it was just a windy ridge. Well just today I swear I heard two female voices behind me, so I stop, look around and I'm standing in the middle of an absolutely silent forest. Weird how that works.
I also heard a noise that sounded like someone blowing into an empty bottle, but if the bottle were the size of a barrel. Then I heard an old rotary phone ringing, but that turned out just to be a woodpecker. So at least I'm not fully crazy.
As for the track team, I never saw them again, but hearing the Pocahontas song not only had it repeating in my head but causing me to remember all of the history lessons about Pocahontas' tribe and their relationship with the English settlers which then (ridiculously) caused me to go on a mental tirade about how the Disney movie just perpetuates the myth that Pocahontas was able to save John Smith with some last second heroics.
Ok, beheading is harsh. Maybe 20 lashes each.
Starry Sky
(Tuesday June 3, 2008)
I got up at 2:53 in the morning to pee and I just ended up staring at the sky for about five minutes (I peed of course).I pop a boner about everything out here, and I say I've never seen anything like this and that, so I can understand if it starts to sound tired after a while, but I swear this trail just ceases to amaze me.
The desert sky at night was an amazingly beautiful thing, stars as far as the eye can see, full constellations like you can't make out back east.
But this sky was something else. It was like a jeweler meticulously arranged a truck load of diamonds onto the deepest navy blue cloth in creation.
There weren't as many stars visible as in the desert, but they were twinkling so bright and I stared for so long that I started to lose my depth perception and it felt like I was hallucinating.
Crazy thing is Kennedy Meadows is at 6000 feet. In 40 miles I'll be up over 10,000. Can't wait to see what the sky looks like then.
An Interesting Bowel Movement
Have you ever watched the sun rise from a ridgetop at 6600 feet while taking a dump in a hole? Neither have I. Until today.
Tehachapi Blues
Friday May 30, 2008)
Tehachapi Blues
"Well, I think I've got my first bout with the trail blahs. I'm attributing it to the weather. Overcast, damp...and it's giving me an overwhelming sense of 'Eh.'
I'm in Tehachapi and I just can't figure out what to do with myself. I'm just wandering around town, nothing's really open yet because it's Sunday morning, so I'm trying to figure out what to do and can't.
It would be a bit easier if the sun was out because I sould hang out in a park near the middle of town, but like I said it's damp and overcast.
Part of the reason for my semi-blues is I can't even really go back to my room. I can, but I don't really even want to. This might be the dumpiest motel I've ever paid to stay in, but when you're looking for cheap and you pay for cheap, you get cheap. I felt skeevy even laying in the bed, so I kind of want to get out of there soon as I can."
So that's how I started a semi-depresed post when I got into Tehachapi (pronouned T'hatch-a-pee) last Saturday. And that was the last pocketmail I wrote until today.
Let me tell you, I was suffering some serious blahs. Couldn't figure out what to do with myself, wandering listlessly around town, being completely indecisive.
I really do attribute it to the weather which messed with my plans to leave town Sunday afternoon. It was unusual weather for the town, and despite being able to infer that just from witnessing rain, hail and snow in the desert, I must have heard that from about half the residents in town and even read about how the "Weird Weather Continues" on the front page of the local paper.
I wouldn't exactly call all that weird, but when you get 350 days of sunshine per year, a weather front like that out of nowhere is something to talk about.
And you're probably wondering (and if you're not, I'm using the about-to-be-posed question as a way to move this piece forward anyway) "Why didn't you just leave anyway if those were your plans?"
Well, if I were on the Appalachian Trail, a situation like that would be the rule rather than the exception, but when I say the town gets 350 days of sunshine a year, that's no lie. The whole damn area I've been hiking through for the last month is a desert and it has been nothing but sunshine the entire time. I have never seen such beautiful weather before in my life, and this is a cool year too so other than that one day, I haven't been oven roasted as is the typical experience. Really, I could see why so many people end up moving out here.
So as you can see, I've gotten a little spoiled. Wait a minute, you're telling me that I woke up this morning and the sky is not completely clear and blue and I have to wear a snow hat for the first hour of hiking? This is appalling, disgusting, preposterous.
But it wasn't just cloudy and cool. The trail around those parts was up between 5000-7000 feet, prime cloud territory, so it was also damp walking through all that. So pardone moi if I didn't want to be wet for the next three days in addition to cold.
It really wasn't supposed to be that way though.
The day I hiked to that RV park in 103 degree heat was actually the day before a cool front rolled into the area. The next day when I got to Agua Dulce, it was hot, but definitely cooler in the low to mid-90's.
Typically people night hike out of Agua Dulce to keep out of the daytime heat and put themselves halfway to Casa de Luna, the next trail angel's house. So I did my first (and probably going to be only) night hike for ten miles or so out of Agua Dulce, but it ended up being needless. It just never got that hot. And that was the start of the "weird" weather.
I get to Casa de Luna and the wind is gusting ridiculously. I know I've said the wind has been bad a few times before, but the news confirmed that gusts in the area were as high as 65 mph. That's what fueled the fire that started on a mountain 10 minutes from the house.
The house has an awesome manzanita (look it up) forest in the backyard where a lot of people camp and at night it seems enchanted (or haunted if you're walking back there alone). In the middle of setting up my tent I hear a siren go off that sounds suspiciously like the firehouse siren back home. But since that thing seems to go off for no reason, I figured they served the same useless purpose on the other side of the country. I get my tent fully set up, hands on hips and a manly nod at a job well done, when someone comes back to tell me to pack it up, that there's a chance we might have to evacuate.
"Evacuate?"
"Yeah, evacuate."
Sigh.
Bag repacked, I head inside to watch the news and check on fire updates. Nothing new at the top of the hour which then transitions to talking about record oil prices and American Airlines charging $15 for a passenger's first checked bag.
The combination of these two bits of terrible news lead one hiker to wax philosophical: "This country sucks. It's going down the tubes."
I know the high price of oil and airline baggage fees can pound the old wallet while hiking for 5 months, but something tells me that people had it a bit worse during the Great Depression.
Right about then I start thinking that evacuation sounds kind of cool, that it might make for a good story, that short of death and bear attack, it could turn out to be one of the most badass hikes of all time.
Fire! Destruction! Getting places without having to walk!
Just then Casa de Luna matriarch Mrs. Anderson dials one of her neighbors warning them about the fire and the possibility of evacuation, telling her to take care and be safe.
Real nice, Brad. "Hey everybody, I got evacuated out of this town because of a fire and all the people there lost their homes and worldly possesions but I didn't have to hike a few miles and I got to tell you all about it. Isn't that great?"
Later during the news, and after a commercial for some new show about the search for America's best dog (maybe this country is going down the tubes) some pretty cool footage comes on showing bulldozers plowing firebreaks around the fire and helicopters dousing the flames. The fire is officially a non-threat.
Casa de Luna is a little...less kept up than Hiker Heaven in Agua Dulce, so not wanting to have to deal with a tent in case of a flare up, I plopped down on one of the two couches in the backyard. Best sleep I've had on the trail bar none, even with the leaves and dirt in the cracks and cushions.
I "slept in" until 6:30am, only woke up because I heard someone walking by, but I actually felt refreshed for once. Very nice.
I planned to just do what I had been doing (25-28 miles per day) to get to Tehachapi in three days, camp Saturday night, hitch in Sunday, hit the post office Monday morning and get my ass out of there Monday afternoon.
(And here comes the big) But I got to talking with Samurai and she reminded me that the post office would be closed Monday for Memorial Day...shit. Now the government was f-ing with my timetable.
So immediately I decide that Saturday morning is the goal. If I do 30+ two days in a row, that leaves around 15 to do Saturday morning which I figure I can knock out in just over three hours. Done.
It was good for me because I like to have a goal. Gives me something to drive for and keeps my mind off of the fact that even though I'd been on the trail for almost a month at that point, I still had over 2000 miles and four months to go.
It also served the dual purpose of getting me away from the herd that was building behind me. There were about 20-25 people at Casa de Luna the night I was there and the late Agua Dulce arrivals said there were 60 people at Hiker Heaven when they left. I was not interested in that at all. Even the crowd 1/3 that size at Casa de Luna was a bit too much for me, so I became even more committed to the 2 1/2 day plan.
A group of early-to-rise hikers had assembled in the driveway waiting for someone to wake up and give us a ride to the trailhead, but after a bit it was pretty clear that only hikers' sleep rhythms got us up at that hour and so we started looking for the car keys.
Not that we were going to steal the car or anything. They let you borrow their car for trail-related stuff. I swear some of this stuff is unimaginable coming from the east coast. You should have seen the amount of beer and food that they brought in for us to eat free-of-charge (of course you make a donation). And they do this day in and day out for the two month window that thru-hikers come through their town. Unreal.
Eventually after finding two sets of keys, neither of which were for the minivan, we just hiked to the main road and hitched up to the trail head.
After a couple of quick pictures with Samurai and Sundown it was off to the races, barely stopping until a long annoying climb to the Bear something campground where I planned on eatig dinner. Of course I missed the trail to the campground, so I ended up eating in the middle of a jeep road.
After dinner hiking was surprisingly relaxed, mostly due to the fact that the trail was very flat and wandered through oak groves with pink and yellow flowers everywhere. The most beautiful and enjoyable scenery that I had seen in quite some time, and as such, I just walked casually until I found a nice flat spot sometime around 7:00pm and plopped down for the night.
In the morning I would find myself adrift in a sea of clouds.
I went to sleep windless, woke up to a pretty strong breeze blowing to the North and on that breeze was carried an endless amount of cloud cover which was getting everything I owned nice and damp.
It wouldn't have been much of an issue but since the weather was so nice the night before I hung everything out to dry in a tree. Retrospectively, I hung out everything to get damp. Damp is much better than wet because it's easy to get used to and eventually your body heat dries the stuff out. But it's still gross to put on a damp shirt and pants in the morning.
I didn't even eat breakfast, just threw everything in my bag and started hiking as the path lost a few thousand feet of elevation in the first couple of miles that day, so I'd be out of the clouds soon enough.
And soon enough it started raining. You've seen the picture of the lovely rainbow that resulted from said rain, but to give that picture to you, I had to suffer through an awful sun shower in mid-70 degree weather. It actually wasn't that bad at all. The rain stopped after a little bit and I was dry minutes later. No biggie.
There's a pit stop called Hiker Town about 40 miles past the Andersons and I reached it about 10:30am or so. A PCT hiker used to own it and from what I can gather the guy committed suicide. Now a guy named Richard Scaggs lives there. He did something in Hollywood (I've heard stunts) and sure enough he was wearing an Oscars sweatshirt when got there. Half the property is old movie sets, like old western store fronts, but weirdly enough Mr. Scaggs wasn't the one that set it up that way. I guess the old owner was a movie fan or thought he could attract film crews there. Who knows.
Either way it's an interesting sight. Dogs and chickens running around, old movie sets and a trailer in the back for hikers to use. Normally people will hang there to wait out the heat and night hike to the mountains, but as you know, the cold front and blah blah blah.
So I stopped in, used the facilities (aka took a dump), refilled on water, watched some Price is Right (Drew Carey stinks) and headed out.
A paper at Hiker Town listed the weather forecast for the week and it said there was a 20% chance of rain that day. That prediction had already been bumped to 100% earlier that morning, but from the looks of things, the sky looked like it was ready for another go.
Next year the trail is being diverted directly to Tehachapi, adding on about 50 miles extra in total, but because this isn't 2009, the current route heads out over a wide open plain following the path of the Los Angeles aqueduct (yes the dried up one you see in movies, but out here it's actually filled with water from the Sierras). This means that you come out of the mountains, walk through a field, down a street passed what looks like an abandoned school and east for a few miles along the water. Then you turn and head directly North for five miles, walking down a dirt road next to a giant pipe holding water for Angelenos. For being such an important resource, the thing is ridiculously unprotected. You can walk right on it and if you sat there banging away all day with a sledgehammer, nobody'd be the wiser.
The funny thing is these dirt roads are part of some town, Antelope Valley I think is the name. Other than a highway, there isn't a single paved road there. It's kind of a weird sight seeing old Civics and Jettas barreling down dusty roads with pickups, but I guess that's just how they roll in the California desert.
I shouldn't say that there is only one dirt road actually. The pipe is buried underground for a long stretch, about nine miles, and it's covered over by concrete so cars just drive right on top of it. So I digress.
Either way, thank God for the trail following the aqueduct because the weather decided to take a turn for the worse.
The sky was menacing enough that I could tell it was probably going to rain when I was at Hiker Town. So imagine my anxiety as I'm walking right into what is going to be a real shit storm.
I'm walking under mostly sunny skies and 100 yards ahead of me are dark dark gray storm clouds, and I keep walking and the clouds stay ahead, keep walking and the storm moves right along in front of me. So I brighten up a bit, imagining myself walking 100 yards behind a pouring desert thundersorm in the sun.
The feeling doesn't last long because off in the distance you can see the clouds being held up by the mountain range, bunching up into something unfriendly. That made me none too happy as the mountan range was exactly where I was headed that night.
And then a loud crack of thunder echoed across the valley.
Second only to being lost in a snow storm in the high Sierras on my list of PCT fears is getting caught in the open desert in a thunderstorm. Washed away in a flash flood or struck by lightning is not my idea of fun.
Like the first time a rattlesnake buzzed at me from under a bush, my heart lept out of my chest and I froze dead in my tracks. I assessed my options, none of which were particularly good:
1) Set up my tent and wait it out.
2) Walk down one of the mile long driveways to one of the ranch houses and see if they'd allow me to hole up in a shed or back room.
3) Make the random abandoned outhouse 25 yards up and to my left my permanent residence.
4) Take my chances and keep going.
Option number 4 it is.
As much as I would have loved being sheltered in an old cramped toilet, continuing on wasn't as dumb as it sounds. As I said earlier, the aqueduct cuts East and is buried underground, giving cars a paved path to drive on. So as the storm headed North into the mountains, I was on some roundabout ass way East, then back West, then finally back North, hopefully to arrive after the storm finished its business.
Normally I hate how the PCT has to negotiate a path around private lands (hence the roundabout ass way), but now that it was saving me from death and/or being soaked, I was thanking the ranchers for refusing us an easement.
The funny thing about ranchers is that they have a bad reputation, that they'll run you off their property at gun point, that they're super hostile to trespassers, and so being out in the middle of ranch country, I wasn't too happy about my prospects if I was to get in some kind of trouble. Miles later, I think I'm nowhere near civilization and getting that periodic feeling of trail vertigo (I just kept walking) when I see a huge truck coming down the road followed by a small truck. There's no room for me to walk and them to drive so I get to the side and let them pass.
The big truck stops, tinted window rolls down and behind it is a guy with big sunglasses and a bigger cowboy hat.
"You a PCT hiker?"
"Yeah, and I was actually wondering if I'm going the right way. You go so long without seeing anyone and you start to doubt yourself."
He grabs the CB radio and presses the button, mumbling something indistinct. He puts the mouthpiece down.
"Yep. You're on the right path. Can we refresh you with some water?"
"No thanks. I've got plenty."
"Well, if you need anything, this is our ranch right here."
The random sign I had been wondering about now made sense.
"Thanks. I really appreciate it."
And with that, I don't think ranchers are as bad as trail talk might have you think.
It actually recharged me a bit to have a conversation and know that you're going the right way, even if you already knew you were. So I took off, not bat-out-of-hell-like, but quick enough.
After crossing near what someone told me is some secret government base (apparently it's blacked out on Google Earth if you want to check), off ahead is my first worst fear. Snow covered mountains. Ugh.
And I know (I fucking know it!) that the path is headed up there. I have to climb up over 6000 feet and the only mountains are the bastards in front of me. Of course the trail looks like it's going up the mountains, then cuts across the plain so it looks like you're not, then it trends towards two ridges, one with snow one without and you can't tell which one it's going for, but you know (you fucking know it!) that it's going to veer right and head towards the snow.
And of course it does.
I met a guy named Argentina and we hiked together to Tylerhorse Canyon where a guy named Crosscut had been hunkered down in the storm that I was able to walk around. Rain and hail, he says.
Before we set up our tents, Crosscut warned us about rocks that had been falling down the mountain all day. He points to an area covered in decent sized rocks where my pack is waiting to be emptied. I decide to move a bit farther away.
The temperature was already dropping when I got to Tylerhorse Canyon which is why I didn't continue on another three miles to Gambler Spring Canyon (that and I was tired as hell) but it just plummeted within a half hour of getting there.
I pulled everything inside my tent, cleaned up as best I could and made myself a sweet ass package of dehydrated hamburgers and mashed potatoes. I didn't even bother cleaning up. Just left the dirty stuff next to me, zipped up my sleeping bag and slept a cold ass sleep.
Originally my plan was to get up at 4:30 to ensure that I would get to the post office in Tehachapi before it closed for the holiday weekend, but as soon as I lay down, I knew that wasn't happening. And when I woke up at 4:30am to go to the bathroom and it was in the 30's and the moon was high in the sky, I definitely knew that wasn't happening.
Still I didn't sleep in that much. I got up around 6:00am, ate a fast breakfast and shoved everything in my bag as quick as I could, including my soaking wet tent. I don't know how it got wet, but it was like I dunked it in the stream right near camp. But I couldn't worry about that. I had a post office to get to.
I had actually noticed that my ankle was bothering me in the middle of the night, sleeping with my foot bent at some strange angle, but man when I started going did I notice it then. Uphills are fine but pounding down any decline made me cringe.
But what could I do? I had a schedule to keep dammit and it was Tehachapi come hell or high water. (I think I've said this before, but they told us at the Kickoff that making hell or high water trail decisions is a bad idea. And you know what I have to say to that? I'll make hell or high water trail decisions whenever I goddamn well please and thank you ma'am).
Of course my first worst fear came true. Snow on the mountain and me hiking alone. I was hoping and praying that we would somehow avoid it, but as soon as I got up around 6000 feet, there it was. My hopes and prayers were sort of answered because the snow was pretty light and even though they're prohibited from doing so, some off road vehicles had driven on the PCT not long before and cut a nice path for me.
The trail was also surprisingly well marked so even without the illegal tire track guide, I think I would have done fine.
In the end I'd rather have had no off road vehicles on the trail because after sloshing through a few miles of wet snow (did you know snow makes your feet cold?) the trail dropped in elevation enough that the snow disappeared and then all there was was destroyed trail and misleading paths that could get somebody lost.
A guy named Crosscut who left the trail in Tehachapi to take a job as a California park ranger actually saw some of the guys and stopped them, berated and lectured them and then let them go. Funny enough Crosscut was not at the time a park ranger even though he said he was and used the somewhat flimsy excuse that he forgot his ticket book or he would have written them up right then and there. Quick thinking hiker with a little gusto and balls - 1; Trail-ruining dirt bikers - 0.
Once I got to the second and final wind farm of my tenure on the PCT (which made for much better pictures this time around and was thankfully much less windy) my ankle started hurting even more which made avoiding the mounds upon piles upon loads of cow and horse shit that all of a sudden decided to appear on the trail slightly more difficult. You wouldn't believe the size of these piles - it was like someone threw a quarter in a cows mouth, pulled its tail and hit the jackpot.
When I reached the trail bottom there was a sign that said trail maintenance for that section was sponsored by a horse riding club. Go figure. Maybe they ride cows too.
I had hitch hiked two times before on the trail, once with a woman named Janice, another with a guy named Dave, but they were either in or very close to towns which were hiker friendly. Getting to Tehachapi is a nine mile hike from a California back road which I've come to realize are basically like highways because the roads are so long and open, and Tehachapi, while familiar with PCT hikers, is not a trail town in the same sense that Idyllwild or Agua Dulce are, so there aren't people jumpng at the chance to hook you up with a ride.
I hit the road just after 12:00pm (which meant I knocked out 17 miles in six and a half hours...score!) which left me two hours to make it to the post office before it closed for two days. So I set my pack up so I would look conspicuously like a hiker in need and stuck out my thumb. An hour later my thumb was still hanging in the breeze.
Three frustrating things from my longish hitch attempt:
1) People who drive by with an empty car, look at you and shrug as if to say, "Wish I could help." At least you know where you stand with people who hit the gas when they see you. The shruggers are just trying to absolve themselves over the guilt of not offering you help even though they could have.
2) The assholes that wave but keep driving. I'm not sitting here waving and sticking my thumb out as part of a side of the highway happiness boosting project. I need a damn ride so stop waving and pull over!
3) This one was more of a unique occurence, but no less frustrating. A cop, who was doing his best to protect and serve the public by using the area in which I was hitching as a place to meet his ticket quota, was causing every car heading in the direction of Tehachapi to slow down, making me think I finally had a ride, only to have them speed back up one they passed him, thus dashing my hopes and dreams on the rocky shores of despair.
A woman in one of the cars that the cop pulled over gave me the shrug, but it was an acceptable one because she saw me trying to hitch for ten minutes or so and I think would have given me a ride, but she was going the other way.
After a phantom pull over (it was somebody who either lived or knew the people at the ranch across the street, but of course I put on my pack, ran over to the driveway and the guy was gone), finally a guy named Jim in a red Jeep stopped and picked me up. The guy went way out of his way to take me to the post office (which for some reason is located about a mile and a half to two miles from the center of Tehachapi. I offered him my measly remaining $3 but he told me to keep it and buy some food. A good guy all around.
Just a quick word of caution. Not all fields are fun to walk through even though they look pretty. I thought I'd cut across this field of shin-high wavy grass and of course its seeds stick to your clothes and give you painful needle pokes.
After a quick lunch at the Apple Shed (ok food, absolutely amazing homemade fudge), I decided to check into a cheap motel to save some money. $45 later and I have the keys to my very own rat hole.
What a dump. The pictures are online, but I'm not sure they do it justice. The place looked like it hadn't been kept up since they first opened it. Rusty window frames, cigarette burns in the comforter, crusty shower head. I wouldn't even walk around in my bare feet and honestly didn't really even want to sleep in the bed, but the sheets looked nice and clean (guarantee they would have miserably failed one of those evening news special reports where the guy goes around scanning hotel rooms with a UV light).
And that (after six prior entries) is where my Tehachapi Blues began. One of the nicest things about going into a town is getting a room where you can get a shower and relax, neither of which I really felt like doing in the Crackhouse Hotel.
The other nice thing (and my absolute favorite) is town food. Trail food is not bad and at the end of a long day can be absolutely delicious, but it's nothing like a restaurant menu with its tons of options and the mouth watering wait until the waitress comes to take your order. Tehachapi unfortunately doesn't have the best food. At best I tasted a B- and at worst a D. I sorely underestimated how disappointed I would be at not being able to get a really good meal.
Another benefit of going to Tehachapi (and one of the reasons I chose to go into the town) was that they had a movie theater. So of all things, I had been waiting to go see the new Indiana Jones and in the trail register before I got off the trail, I wrote that I couldn't wait to see it.
I bought my favorite movie snacks (Cherry Coke and a bag of Reeses Pieces...ok so I was able to get something good), sat down, had a little chat with a woman who was upset that we were part of the overflow who was put in the smaller theater, and then, the lights dimmed.
Two hours later I walked back to my room...you guessed it...disappointed. I mean come on. An alien skull that has the power to give the possesor all of the knowledge in the world? That's the best they could come up with? At least they could have gone with a less ridiculous mythical object like Excalibur or a crystal ball that predicts the future. Aliens? Please.
It was not the ideal tone to set in order to get me excited to be back on the trail. And the next day, when it was cold and raining, my mood sank even further.
I check out of my room, but I don't want to leave town. Even the Buttcheek Villa was better than wet camping. So I wandered. Went to different stores, got blah food even though I wasn't hungry and then when the weather still hadn't cleared up, decided to go to the movies to see the new Chronicles of Narnia and leave afterwards.
I snuck a milkshake in from a restaurant in town that was supposed to have some of the best on the trail. Not surprisingly it was just okay. But I should have known that from the night before when I got a burger with a slice of pineapple and teriyaki sauce on top. That part of the burger was actually tasty. What wasn't, and what the girl at the counter failed to tell me was that they also put mayo and tomato on the burger as well, which pretty much defeated the purpose of the teriyaki and pineapple slice.
But while waiting in line for my burger, two things happened:
1) They had Charlie Chaplin films playing on a flat screen TV on the wall and they were surprisingly funny. I thought they'd be horrendously unfunny like the Three Stooges, but I chuckled numerous times.
2) I started chatting with a guy who lives in the area and we got to talking about the PCT. Turns out he works for NASA and offered to give me a ride to the trail if I needed one.
So who sits down two seats over from me in Chronicles of Narnia, but the NASA guy. Kind of strange a 24 year old and a guy in his mid-30's seeing a movie, each alone, in a theater filled to the brim with children and their parents.
I ended up falling asleep part way through, just out of tiredness, not because I was bored with the movie. But even still, it wasn't as good as I thought and when I left for my supposed departure for the trail, it was raining and even colder.
NASA guy saw the look on my face and asked if I was going to head out to which I told him no way. Thankfully he drove me to the Best Western down the road where I knew some hikers were holed up, and the front desk lady let me hang around in the lobby until I was able to spot someone.
Argentina (who I camped with at Tylerhorse Canyon) and two Canadians, Angela and Colin, were sharing a room and were gracious enough to let me crash on the floor for $20.
This boosted my spirits immensely as I now had a clean room and bathroom to use and didn't have to sleep in the cold and wet. But for some reason I still couldn't shake my feelings of sadness.
I think it still had everything to do with not having a set plan, because the next day the weather was still shitty and I went through another couple of hours of back and forth about staying until Colin and Angela decided that they wanted to stay another night, which made my decision for me. I was even somewhat productive that day, going to K-Mart for new socks and finally making the decision to start wearing underwear (extreme chafing will do that). We watched Return of the Jedi and Ace Ventura (which I hadn't seen in forever) and I was giggling like a schoolgirl the entire time. I made my third trip to the movies and saw Iron Man (loved it - finally saw a good one). The Best Western even had a continental breakfast which was my first opportunity to have cereal on the entire trail, one of which I took full advantage and had like six bowls, selfishly using up all the milk and causing Angela to pour herself a cup of coffee then dump it out because she had no milk to put in it!
And yet I still, after all that, was in a fog of blah.
Getting back on the trail didn't really help either, which I thought it would. My pack felt extra heavy after two and a half days off and I kept slipping on these non-existent descents, falling outright once and cutting my knee. It was just completely frustrating.
I had also decided to bypass my next town stop (Lake Isabella) because I had been in Tehachapi for much longer than expected, and that was making me upset because I didn't want to go the six or seven days to Kennedy Meadows without a town stop, and by skipping Lake Isabella, I'd be missing out on Nelda's Diner which supposedly had (hadn't I heard something like this before?) a killer selection of milkshakes.
So I'm just out there hiking alternately sad and angry and Lake Isabella is getting closer and closer. I don't know what I want to do, but I just want to not feel this way on what is supposed to be one of the best times of my life. I really even felt guilty just for feeling sad. "You're out on this trail doing something that few people get the chance to. You're not allowed to feel sad."
And then my ankle flares up again. Of course while in Tehachapi I did zero rehab on my ankle, so surprise surprise two days later I'm limping along. This was probably the low point of the trail thus far. I didn't know how far I was going to be able to hike each day because my ankle would start killing me at the 20 mile mark, and then it would throb at night. Miserable.
So I'm hiking up to a peak near 7000 feet and I meet a guy who asks me if I'm going to Lake Isabella. I tell him that I'm not and he says that he is. Internally I get pissed because I'm jealous and I hike away in a huff. But the conversation was the spark I needed to get out of my trail funk.
Now I'm openly debating whether to go in or not. I just stayed in Tehachapi for two and a half days, but I really want to go to Lake Isabella. Kennedy Meadows is just a couple of days from Lake Isabella so why stop? But I really want that damn milkshake.
So I keep climbing and I meet up with two people and we stop together to take a breather. I tell them I'm debating whether or not to go into town and they tell me that they're going in because even though they just took five days off to rest the woman's foot, it was acting up and they wanted to give it another break.
"Five days!?" I thought to myself. And here I was worrying over two and a half.
And just then I remembered the moment during one of my training hikes when I didn't want to stop to get out my water bottle but finally had to because I just couldn't grab it, and how absolutely angering it was. But also realizing that if I needed to stop to get the water bottle, why not? What was stopping me? If I wanted the water, why not just stop and grab it?
If my ankle hurt and I wanted to go into town and take a day, even though I just had two and a half off, why not? What was stopping me?
And that was it. Almost instantaneously my mood lifted and I felt happy again. I had the prospect of a room, a shower and a delicious milkshake in front of me again, and it was only a day away.
And like that, all was right in the world once more. The next morning a trail angel was parked at the campground near the road into Lake Isabella so I got to have cinnamon buns, cookies, fruit and soda at 9:00am. I also met two of the nicest and funniest people on the trail so far who were also going into Lake Isabella, so we caught a hitch in together with a Canadian who was on a post-grad school road trip through the U.S. and Canada. He talked our ear off for the entire ride and seemed to know more about American politics than we did. He also told us about some controversy over Canada's sovereignty over the Northwest Passage and how they were ptting battleships up there to assert control. Meanwhile I'm sitting there thinking, "Canada has a navy?"
I smiled to myself and stared out the window, listening to the guy go on about how much he loves Obama, throwing in my two cents about life here and there, and watching the cows graze in the deep green grasses at the foot of the desert mountains.
It was good to be back.
Oh, and the milkshake was the shit.
Tehachapi Blues
"Well, I think I've got my first bout with the trail blahs. I'm attributing it to the weather. Overcast, damp...and it's giving me an overwhelming sense of 'Eh.'
I'm in Tehachapi and I just can't figure out what to do with myself. I'm just wandering around town, nothing's really open yet because it's Sunday morning, so I'm trying to figure out what to do and can't.
It would be a bit easier if the sun was out because I sould hang out in a park near the middle of town, but like I said it's damp and overcast.
Part of the reason for my semi-blues is I can't even really go back to my room. I can, but I don't really even want to. This might be the dumpiest motel I've ever paid to stay in, but when you're looking for cheap and you pay for cheap, you get cheap. I felt skeevy even laying in the bed, so I kind of want to get out of there soon as I can."
So that's how I started a semi-depresed post when I got into Tehachapi (pronouned T'hatch-a-pee) last Saturday. And that was the last pocketmail I wrote until today.
Let me tell you, I was suffering some serious blahs. Couldn't figure out what to do with myself, wandering listlessly around town, being completely indecisive.
I really do attribute it to the weather which messed with my plans to leave town Sunday afternoon. It was unusual weather for the town, and despite being able to infer that just from witnessing rain, hail and snow in the desert, I must have heard that from about half the residents in town and even read about how the "Weird Weather Continues" on the front page of the local paper.
I wouldn't exactly call all that weird, but when you get 350 days of sunshine per year, a weather front like that out of nowhere is something to talk about.
And you're probably wondering (and if you're not, I'm using the about-to-be-posed question as a way to move this piece forward anyway) "Why didn't you just leave anyway if those were your plans?"
Well, if I were on the Appalachian Trail, a situation like that would be the rule rather than the exception, but when I say the town gets 350 days of sunshine a year, that's no lie. The whole damn area I've been hiking through for the last month is a desert and it has been nothing but sunshine the entire time. I have never seen such beautiful weather before in my life, and this is a cool year too so other than that one day, I haven't been oven roasted as is the typical experience. Really, I could see why so many people end up moving out here.
So as you can see, I've gotten a little spoiled. Wait a minute, you're telling me that I woke up this morning and the sky is not completely clear and blue and I have to wear a snow hat for the first hour of hiking? This is appalling, disgusting, preposterous.
But it wasn't just cloudy and cool. The trail around those parts was up between 5000-7000 feet, prime cloud territory, so it was also damp walking through all that. So pardone moi if I didn't want to be wet for the next three days in addition to cold.
It really wasn't supposed to be that way though.
The day I hiked to that RV park in 103 degree heat was actually the day before a cool front rolled into the area. The next day when I got to Agua Dulce, it was hot, but definitely cooler in the low to mid-90's.
Typically people night hike out of Agua Dulce to keep out of the daytime heat and put themselves halfway to Casa de Luna, the next trail angel's house. So I did my first (and probably going to be only) night hike for ten miles or so out of Agua Dulce, but it ended up being needless. It just never got that hot. And that was the start of the "weird" weather.
I get to Casa de Luna and the wind is gusting ridiculously. I know I've said the wind has been bad a few times before, but the news confirmed that gusts in the area were as high as 65 mph. That's what fueled the fire that started on a mountain 10 minutes from the house.
The house has an awesome manzanita (look it up) forest in the backyard where a lot of people camp and at night it seems enchanted (or haunted if you're walking back there alone). In the middle of setting up my tent I hear a siren go off that sounds suspiciously like the firehouse siren back home. But since that thing seems to go off for no reason, I figured they served the same useless purpose on the other side of the country. I get my tent fully set up, hands on hips and a manly nod at a job well done, when someone comes back to tell me to pack it up, that there's a chance we might have to evacuate.
"Evacuate?"
"Yeah, evacuate."
Sigh.
Bag repacked, I head inside to watch the news and check on fire updates. Nothing new at the top of the hour which then transitions to talking about record oil prices and American Airlines charging $15 for a passenger's first checked bag.
The combination of these two bits of terrible news lead one hiker to wax philosophical: "This country sucks. It's going down the tubes."
I know the high price of oil and airline baggage fees can pound the old wallet while hiking for 5 months, but something tells me that people had it a bit worse during the Great Depression.
Right about then I start thinking that evacuation sounds kind of cool, that it might make for a good story, that short of death and bear attack, it could turn out to be one of the most badass hikes of all time.
Fire! Destruction! Getting places without having to walk!
Just then Casa de Luna matriarch Mrs. Anderson dials one of her neighbors warning them about the fire and the possibility of evacuation, telling her to take care and be safe.
Real nice, Brad. "Hey everybody, I got evacuated out of this town because of a fire and all the people there lost their homes and worldly possesions but I didn't have to hike a few miles and I got to tell you all about it. Isn't that great?"
Later during the news, and after a commercial for some new show about the search for America's best dog (maybe this country is going down the tubes) some pretty cool footage comes on showing bulldozers plowing firebreaks around the fire and helicopters dousing the flames. The fire is officially a non-threat.
Casa de Luna is a little...less kept up than Hiker Heaven in Agua Dulce, so not wanting to have to deal with a tent in case of a flare up, I plopped down on one of the two couches in the backyard. Best sleep I've had on the trail bar none, even with the leaves and dirt in the cracks and cushions.
I "slept in" until 6:30am, only woke up because I heard someone walking by, but I actually felt refreshed for once. Very nice.
I planned to just do what I had been doing (25-28 miles per day) to get to Tehachapi in three days, camp Saturday night, hitch in Sunday, hit the post office Monday morning and get my ass out of there Monday afternoon.
(And here comes the big) But I got to talking with Samurai and she reminded me that the post office would be closed Monday for Memorial Day...shit. Now the government was f-ing with my timetable.
So immediately I decide that Saturday morning is the goal. If I do 30+ two days in a row, that leaves around 15 to do Saturday morning which I figure I can knock out in just over three hours. Done.
It was good for me because I like to have a goal. Gives me something to drive for and keeps my mind off of the fact that even though I'd been on the trail for almost a month at that point, I still had over 2000 miles and four months to go.
It also served the dual purpose of getting me away from the herd that was building behind me. There were about 20-25 people at Casa de Luna the night I was there and the late Agua Dulce arrivals said there were 60 people at Hiker Heaven when they left. I was not interested in that at all. Even the crowd 1/3 that size at Casa de Luna was a bit too much for me, so I became even more committed to the 2 1/2 day plan.
A group of early-to-rise hikers had assembled in the driveway waiting for someone to wake up and give us a ride to the trailhead, but after a bit it was pretty clear that only hikers' sleep rhythms got us up at that hour and so we started looking for the car keys.
Not that we were going to steal the car or anything. They let you borrow their car for trail-related stuff. I swear some of this stuff is unimaginable coming from the east coast. You should have seen the amount of beer and food that they brought in for us to eat free-of-charge (of course you make a donation). And they do this day in and day out for the two month window that thru-hikers come through their town. Unreal.
Eventually after finding two sets of keys, neither of which were for the minivan, we just hiked to the main road and hitched up to the trail head.
After a couple of quick pictures with Samurai and Sundown it was off to the races, barely stopping until a long annoying climb to the Bear something campground where I planned on eatig dinner. Of course I missed the trail to the campground, so I ended up eating in the middle of a jeep road.
After dinner hiking was surprisingly relaxed, mostly due to the fact that the trail was very flat and wandered through oak groves with pink and yellow flowers everywhere. The most beautiful and enjoyable scenery that I had seen in quite some time, and as such, I just walked casually until I found a nice flat spot sometime around 7:00pm and plopped down for the night.
In the morning I would find myself adrift in a sea of clouds.
I went to sleep windless, woke up to a pretty strong breeze blowing to the North and on that breeze was carried an endless amount of cloud cover which was getting everything I owned nice and damp.
It wouldn't have been much of an issue but since the weather was so nice the night before I hung everything out to dry in a tree. Retrospectively, I hung out everything to get damp. Damp is much better than wet because it's easy to get used to and eventually your body heat dries the stuff out. But it's still gross to put on a damp shirt and pants in the morning.
I didn't even eat breakfast, just threw everything in my bag and started hiking as the path lost a few thousand feet of elevation in the first couple of miles that day, so I'd be out of the clouds soon enough.
And soon enough it started raining. You've seen the picture of the lovely rainbow that resulted from said rain, but to give that picture to you, I had to suffer through an awful sun shower in mid-70 degree weather. It actually wasn't that bad at all. The rain stopped after a little bit and I was dry minutes later. No biggie.
There's a pit stop called Hiker Town about 40 miles past the Andersons and I reached it about 10:30am or so. A PCT hiker used to own it and from what I can gather the guy committed suicide. Now a guy named Richard Scaggs lives there. He did something in Hollywood (I've heard stunts) and sure enough he was wearing an Oscars sweatshirt when got there. Half the property is old movie sets, like old western store fronts, but weirdly enough Mr. Scaggs wasn't the one that set it up that way. I guess the old owner was a movie fan or thought he could attract film crews there. Who knows.
Either way it's an interesting sight. Dogs and chickens running around, old movie sets and a trailer in the back for hikers to use. Normally people will hang there to wait out the heat and night hike to the mountains, but as you know, the cold front and blah blah blah.
So I stopped in, used the facilities (aka took a dump), refilled on water, watched some Price is Right (Drew Carey stinks) and headed out.
A paper at Hiker Town listed the weather forecast for the week and it said there was a 20% chance of rain that day. That prediction had already been bumped to 100% earlier that morning, but from the looks of things, the sky looked like it was ready for another go.
Next year the trail is being diverted directly to Tehachapi, adding on about 50 miles extra in total, but because this isn't 2009, the current route heads out over a wide open plain following the path of the Los Angeles aqueduct (yes the dried up one you see in movies, but out here it's actually filled with water from the Sierras). This means that you come out of the mountains, walk through a field, down a street passed what looks like an abandoned school and east for a few miles along the water. Then you turn and head directly North for five miles, walking down a dirt road next to a giant pipe holding water for Angelenos. For being such an important resource, the thing is ridiculously unprotected. You can walk right on it and if you sat there banging away all day with a sledgehammer, nobody'd be the wiser.
The funny thing is these dirt roads are part of some town, Antelope Valley I think is the name. Other than a highway, there isn't a single paved road there. It's kind of a weird sight seeing old Civics and Jettas barreling down dusty roads with pickups, but I guess that's just how they roll in the California desert.
I shouldn't say that there is only one dirt road actually. The pipe is buried underground for a long stretch, about nine miles, and it's covered over by concrete so cars just drive right on top of it. So I digress.
Either way, thank God for the trail following the aqueduct because the weather decided to take a turn for the worse.
The sky was menacing enough that I could tell it was probably going to rain when I was at Hiker Town. So imagine my anxiety as I'm walking right into what is going to be a real shit storm.
I'm walking under mostly sunny skies and 100 yards ahead of me are dark dark gray storm clouds, and I keep walking and the clouds stay ahead, keep walking and the storm moves right along in front of me. So I brighten up a bit, imagining myself walking 100 yards behind a pouring desert thundersorm in the sun.
The feeling doesn't last long because off in the distance you can see the clouds being held up by the mountain range, bunching up into something unfriendly. That made me none too happy as the mountan range was exactly where I was headed that night.
And then a loud crack of thunder echoed across the valley.
Second only to being lost in a snow storm in the high Sierras on my list of PCT fears is getting caught in the open desert in a thunderstorm. Washed away in a flash flood or struck by lightning is not my idea of fun.
Like the first time a rattlesnake buzzed at me from under a bush, my heart lept out of my chest and I froze dead in my tracks. I assessed my options, none of which were particularly good:
1) Set up my tent and wait it out.
2) Walk down one of the mile long driveways to one of the ranch houses and see if they'd allow me to hole up in a shed or back room.
3) Make the random abandoned outhouse 25 yards up and to my left my permanent residence.
4) Take my chances and keep going.
Option number 4 it is.
As much as I would have loved being sheltered in an old cramped toilet, continuing on wasn't as dumb as it sounds. As I said earlier, the aqueduct cuts East and is buried underground, giving cars a paved path to drive on. So as the storm headed North into the mountains, I was on some roundabout ass way East, then back West, then finally back North, hopefully to arrive after the storm finished its business.
Normally I hate how the PCT has to negotiate a path around private lands (hence the roundabout ass way), but now that it was saving me from death and/or being soaked, I was thanking the ranchers for refusing us an easement.
The funny thing about ranchers is that they have a bad reputation, that they'll run you off their property at gun point, that they're super hostile to trespassers, and so being out in the middle of ranch country, I wasn't too happy about my prospects if I was to get in some kind of trouble. Miles later, I think I'm nowhere near civilization and getting that periodic feeling of trail vertigo (I just kept walking) when I see a huge truck coming down the road followed by a small truck. There's no room for me to walk and them to drive so I get to the side and let them pass.
The big truck stops, tinted window rolls down and behind it is a guy with big sunglasses and a bigger cowboy hat.
"You a PCT hiker?"
"Yeah, and I was actually wondering if I'm going the right way. You go so long without seeing anyone and you start to doubt yourself."
He grabs the CB radio and presses the button, mumbling something indistinct. He puts the mouthpiece down.
"Yep. You're on the right path. Can we refresh you with some water?"
"No thanks. I've got plenty."
"Well, if you need anything, this is our ranch right here."
The random sign I had been wondering about now made sense.
"Thanks. I really appreciate it."
And with that, I don't think ranchers are as bad as trail talk might have you think.
It actually recharged me a bit to have a conversation and know that you're going the right way, even if you already knew you were. So I took off, not bat-out-of-hell-like, but quick enough.
After crossing near what someone told me is some secret government base (apparently it's blacked out on Google Earth if you want to check), off ahead is my first worst fear. Snow covered mountains. Ugh.
And I know (I fucking know it!) that the path is headed up there. I have to climb up over 6000 feet and the only mountains are the bastards in front of me. Of course the trail looks like it's going up the mountains, then cuts across the plain so it looks like you're not, then it trends towards two ridges, one with snow one without and you can't tell which one it's going for, but you know (you fucking know it!) that it's going to veer right and head towards the snow.
And of course it does.
I met a guy named Argentina and we hiked together to Tylerhorse Canyon where a guy named Crosscut had been hunkered down in the storm that I was able to walk around. Rain and hail, he says.
Before we set up our tents, Crosscut warned us about rocks that had been falling down the mountain all day. He points to an area covered in decent sized rocks where my pack is waiting to be emptied. I decide to move a bit farther away.
The temperature was already dropping when I got to Tylerhorse Canyon which is why I didn't continue on another three miles to Gambler Spring Canyon (that and I was tired as hell) but it just plummeted within a half hour of getting there.
I pulled everything inside my tent, cleaned up as best I could and made myself a sweet ass package of dehydrated hamburgers and mashed potatoes. I didn't even bother cleaning up. Just left the dirty stuff next to me, zipped up my sleeping bag and slept a cold ass sleep.
Originally my plan was to get up at 4:30 to ensure that I would get to the post office in Tehachapi before it closed for the holiday weekend, but as soon as I lay down, I knew that wasn't happening. And when I woke up at 4:30am to go to the bathroom and it was in the 30's and the moon was high in the sky, I definitely knew that wasn't happening.
Still I didn't sleep in that much. I got up around 6:00am, ate a fast breakfast and shoved everything in my bag as quick as I could, including my soaking wet tent. I don't know how it got wet, but it was like I dunked it in the stream right near camp. But I couldn't worry about that. I had a post office to get to.
I had actually noticed that my ankle was bothering me in the middle of the night, sleeping with my foot bent at some strange angle, but man when I started going did I notice it then. Uphills are fine but pounding down any decline made me cringe.
But what could I do? I had a schedule to keep dammit and it was Tehachapi come hell or high water. (I think I've said this before, but they told us at the Kickoff that making hell or high water trail decisions is a bad idea. And you know what I have to say to that? I'll make hell or high water trail decisions whenever I goddamn well please and thank you ma'am).
Of course my first worst fear came true. Snow on the mountain and me hiking alone. I was hoping and praying that we would somehow avoid it, but as soon as I got up around 6000 feet, there it was. My hopes and prayers were sort of answered because the snow was pretty light and even though they're prohibited from doing so, some off road vehicles had driven on the PCT not long before and cut a nice path for me.
The trail was also surprisingly well marked so even without the illegal tire track guide, I think I would have done fine.
In the end I'd rather have had no off road vehicles on the trail because after sloshing through a few miles of wet snow (did you know snow makes your feet cold?) the trail dropped in elevation enough that the snow disappeared and then all there was was destroyed trail and misleading paths that could get somebody lost.
A guy named Crosscut who left the trail in Tehachapi to take a job as a California park ranger actually saw some of the guys and stopped them, berated and lectured them and then let them go. Funny enough Crosscut was not at the time a park ranger even though he said he was and used the somewhat flimsy excuse that he forgot his ticket book or he would have written them up right then and there. Quick thinking hiker with a little gusto and balls - 1; Trail-ruining dirt bikers - 0.
Once I got to the second and final wind farm of my tenure on the PCT (which made for much better pictures this time around and was thankfully much less windy) my ankle started hurting even more which made avoiding the mounds upon piles upon loads of cow and horse shit that all of a sudden decided to appear on the trail slightly more difficult. You wouldn't believe the size of these piles - it was like someone threw a quarter in a cows mouth, pulled its tail and hit the jackpot.
When I reached the trail bottom there was a sign that said trail maintenance for that section was sponsored by a horse riding club. Go figure. Maybe they ride cows too.
I had hitch hiked two times before on the trail, once with a woman named Janice, another with a guy named Dave, but they were either in or very close to towns which were hiker friendly. Getting to Tehachapi is a nine mile hike from a California back road which I've come to realize are basically like highways because the roads are so long and open, and Tehachapi, while familiar with PCT hikers, is not a trail town in the same sense that Idyllwild or Agua Dulce are, so there aren't people jumpng at the chance to hook you up with a ride.
I hit the road just after 12:00pm (which meant I knocked out 17 miles in six and a half hours...score!) which left me two hours to make it to the post office before it closed for two days. So I set my pack up so I would look conspicuously like a hiker in need and stuck out my thumb. An hour later my thumb was still hanging in the breeze.
Three frustrating things from my longish hitch attempt:
1) People who drive by with an empty car, look at you and shrug as if to say, "Wish I could help." At least you know where you stand with people who hit the gas when they see you. The shruggers are just trying to absolve themselves over the guilt of not offering you help even though they could have.
2) The assholes that wave but keep driving. I'm not sitting here waving and sticking my thumb out as part of a side of the highway happiness boosting project. I need a damn ride so stop waving and pull over!
3) This one was more of a unique occurence, but no less frustrating. A cop, who was doing his best to protect and serve the public by using the area in which I was hitching as a place to meet his ticket quota, was causing every car heading in the direction of Tehachapi to slow down, making me think I finally had a ride, only to have them speed back up one they passed him, thus dashing my hopes and dreams on the rocky shores of despair.
A woman in one of the cars that the cop pulled over gave me the shrug, but it was an acceptable one because she saw me trying to hitch for ten minutes or so and I think would have given me a ride, but she was going the other way.
After a phantom pull over (it was somebody who either lived or knew the people at the ranch across the street, but of course I put on my pack, ran over to the driveway and the guy was gone), finally a guy named Jim in a red Jeep stopped and picked me up. The guy went way out of his way to take me to the post office (which for some reason is located about a mile and a half to two miles from the center of Tehachapi. I offered him my measly remaining $3 but he told me to keep it and buy some food. A good guy all around.
Just a quick word of caution. Not all fields are fun to walk through even though they look pretty. I thought I'd cut across this field of shin-high wavy grass and of course its seeds stick to your clothes and give you painful needle pokes.
After a quick lunch at the Apple Shed (ok food, absolutely amazing homemade fudge), I decided to check into a cheap motel to save some money. $45 later and I have the keys to my very own rat hole.
What a dump. The pictures are online, but I'm not sure they do it justice. The place looked like it hadn't been kept up since they first opened it. Rusty window frames, cigarette burns in the comforter, crusty shower head. I wouldn't even walk around in my bare feet and honestly didn't really even want to sleep in the bed, but the sheets looked nice and clean (guarantee they would have miserably failed one of those evening news special reports where the guy goes around scanning hotel rooms with a UV light).
And that (after six prior entries) is where my Tehachapi Blues began. One of the nicest things about going into a town is getting a room where you can get a shower and relax, neither of which I really felt like doing in the Crackhouse Hotel.
The other nice thing (and my absolute favorite) is town food. Trail food is not bad and at the end of a long day can be absolutely delicious, but it's nothing like a restaurant menu with its tons of options and the mouth watering wait until the waitress comes to take your order. Tehachapi unfortunately doesn't have the best food. At best I tasted a B- and at worst a D. I sorely underestimated how disappointed I would be at not being able to get a really good meal.
Another benefit of going to Tehachapi (and one of the reasons I chose to go into the town) was that they had a movie theater. So of all things, I had been waiting to go see the new Indiana Jones and in the trail register before I got off the trail, I wrote that I couldn't wait to see it.
I bought my favorite movie snacks (Cherry Coke and a bag of Reeses Pieces...ok so I was able to get something good), sat down, had a little chat with a woman who was upset that we were part of the overflow who was put in the smaller theater, and then, the lights dimmed.
Two hours later I walked back to my room...you guessed it...disappointed. I mean come on. An alien skull that has the power to give the possesor all of the knowledge in the world? That's the best they could come up with? At least they could have gone with a less ridiculous mythical object like Excalibur or a crystal ball that predicts the future. Aliens? Please.
It was not the ideal tone to set in order to get me excited to be back on the trail. And the next day, when it was cold and raining, my mood sank even further.
I check out of my room, but I don't want to leave town. Even the Buttcheek Villa was better than wet camping. So I wandered. Went to different stores, got blah food even though I wasn't hungry and then when the weather still hadn't cleared up, decided to go to the movies to see the new Chronicles of Narnia and leave afterwards.
I snuck a milkshake in from a restaurant in town that was supposed to have some of the best on the trail. Not surprisingly it was just okay. But I should have known that from the night before when I got a burger with a slice of pineapple and teriyaki sauce on top. That part of the burger was actually tasty. What wasn't, and what the girl at the counter failed to tell me was that they also put mayo and tomato on the burger as well, which pretty much defeated the purpose of the teriyaki and pineapple slice.
But while waiting in line for my burger, two things happened:
1) They had Charlie Chaplin films playing on a flat screen TV on the wall and they were surprisingly funny. I thought they'd be horrendously unfunny like the Three Stooges, but I chuckled numerous times.
2) I started chatting with a guy who lives in the area and we got to talking about the PCT. Turns out he works for NASA and offered to give me a ride to the trail if I needed one.
So who sits down two seats over from me in Chronicles of Narnia, but the NASA guy. Kind of strange a 24 year old and a guy in his mid-30's seeing a movie, each alone, in a theater filled to the brim with children and their parents.
I ended up falling asleep part way through, just out of tiredness, not because I was bored with the movie. But even still, it wasn't as good as I thought and when I left for my supposed departure for the trail, it was raining and even colder.
NASA guy saw the look on my face and asked if I was going to head out to which I told him no way. Thankfully he drove me to the Best Western down the road where I knew some hikers were holed up, and the front desk lady let me hang around in the lobby until I was able to spot someone.
Argentina (who I camped with at Tylerhorse Canyon) and two Canadians, Angela and Colin, were sharing a room and were gracious enough to let me crash on the floor for $20.
This boosted my spirits immensely as I now had a clean room and bathroom to use and didn't have to sleep in the cold and wet. But for some reason I still couldn't shake my feelings of sadness.
I think it still had everything to do with not having a set plan, because the next day the weather was still shitty and I went through another couple of hours of back and forth about staying until Colin and Angela decided that they wanted to stay another night, which made my decision for me. I was even somewhat productive that day, going to K-Mart for new socks and finally making the decision to start wearing underwear (extreme chafing will do that). We watched Return of the Jedi and Ace Ventura (which I hadn't seen in forever) and I was giggling like a schoolgirl the entire time. I made my third trip to the movies and saw Iron Man (loved it - finally saw a good one). The Best Western even had a continental breakfast which was my first opportunity to have cereal on the entire trail, one of which I took full advantage and had like six bowls, selfishly using up all the milk and causing Angela to pour herself a cup of coffee then dump it out because she had no milk to put in it!
And yet I still, after all that, was in a fog of blah.
Getting back on the trail didn't really help either, which I thought it would. My pack felt extra heavy after two and a half days off and I kept slipping on these non-existent descents, falling outright once and cutting my knee. It was just completely frustrating.
I had also decided to bypass my next town stop (Lake Isabella) because I had been in Tehachapi for much longer than expected, and that was making me upset because I didn't want to go the six or seven days to Kennedy Meadows without a town stop, and by skipping Lake Isabella, I'd be missing out on Nelda's Diner which supposedly had (hadn't I heard something like this before?) a killer selection of milkshakes.
So I'm just out there hiking alternately sad and angry and Lake Isabella is getting closer and closer. I don't know what I want to do, but I just want to not feel this way on what is supposed to be one of the best times of my life. I really even felt guilty just for feeling sad. "You're out on this trail doing something that few people get the chance to. You're not allowed to feel sad."
And then my ankle flares up again. Of course while in Tehachapi I did zero rehab on my ankle, so surprise surprise two days later I'm limping along. This was probably the low point of the trail thus far. I didn't know how far I was going to be able to hike each day because my ankle would start killing me at the 20 mile mark, and then it would throb at night. Miserable.
So I'm hiking up to a peak near 7000 feet and I meet a guy who asks me if I'm going to Lake Isabella. I tell him that I'm not and he says that he is. Internally I get pissed because I'm jealous and I hike away in a huff. But the conversation was the spark I needed to get out of my trail funk.
Now I'm openly debating whether to go in or not. I just stayed in Tehachapi for two and a half days, but I really want to go to Lake Isabella. Kennedy Meadows is just a couple of days from Lake Isabella so why stop? But I really want that damn milkshake.
So I keep climbing and I meet up with two people and we stop together to take a breather. I tell them I'm debating whether or not to go into town and they tell me that they're going in because even though they just took five days off to rest the woman's foot, it was acting up and they wanted to give it another break.
"Five days!?" I thought to myself. And here I was worrying over two and a half.
And just then I remembered the moment during one of my training hikes when I didn't want to stop to get out my water bottle but finally had to because I just couldn't grab it, and how absolutely angering it was. But also realizing that if I needed to stop to get the water bottle, why not? What was stopping me? If I wanted the water, why not just stop and grab it?
If my ankle hurt and I wanted to go into town and take a day, even though I just had two and a half off, why not? What was stopping me?
And that was it. Almost instantaneously my mood lifted and I felt happy again. I had the prospect of a room, a shower and a delicious milkshake in front of me again, and it was only a day away.
And like that, all was right in the world once more. The next morning a trail angel was parked at the campground near the road into Lake Isabella so I got to have cinnamon buns, cookies, fruit and soda at 9:00am. I also met two of the nicest and funniest people on the trail so far who were also going into Lake Isabella, so we caught a hitch in together with a Canadian who was on a post-grad school road trip through the U.S. and Canada. He talked our ear off for the entire ride and seemed to know more about American politics than we did. He also told us about some controversy over Canada's sovereignty over the Northwest Passage and how they were ptting battleships up there to assert control. Meanwhile I'm sitting there thinking, "Canada has a navy?"
I smiled to myself and stared out the window, listening to the guy go on about how much he loves Obama, throwing in my two cents about life here and there, and watching the cows graze in the deep green grasses at the foot of the desert mountains.
It was good to be back.
Oh, and the milkshake was the shit.
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