In the morning, I saw the trail angel who was maintaining these caches. He looked pretty much like a hiker. He drove out to both caches every day, and it takes hours of driving on dirt roads to reach either.
The rest of the day was a fast hike. We were going to Walker Pass, where we’d be taking a zero in Ridgecrest. Most of the pictures I took today are just showing what the trail was like.
We’re nearing the end of the desert. People generally count the first 700 miles of the PCT as desert, but it’s not a sudden change. We’ll be going in and out of the desert for a while.
We reached Walker Pass in the early afternoon. There were the telltale sun shades of trail magic, but this was quite a bit more than usual.
It turns out, we’d arrived on a weekend when many of the major figures of the PCT world had decided to set up some top-quality trail magic at Walker Pass.
Yogi, author of the most widely-used guidebook was there, as were several people who’d been in Wild.
Meadow Man (AKA Meadow Ed), whose role in Wild had been to tell the main character that her shoes were too small, was there. He made me a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato and onion, and pointed out that my shoes’ toes were delaminating.
Stone Dancer was greeting hikers and showing them around the encampment. She was a thru-hiker in 2011, with her husband. Until, 200 miles in, her husband fell off a cliff. He died, but she finished the hike later that year.
We also ran into our old hiking partner, Bill. Garrett was way ahead of us, and Wonky had needed to take 6 days off to go to a wedding. Bill had slowed down quite a bit, and had even taken a zero at the trail magic. We learned that he did, in fact, have a trail name, contrary to what I’d thought: Bobber. He’d received it on the Appalachian Trail. It didn’t have anything to do with anything he’d done, it just sounded like his middle name.
After a grilled cheese sandwich, Cactus Cooler, pink lemonade, ice cream, and more, we were on our way into Ridgecrest, eagerly anticipating laundry, showers, and town food.