Month: July 2016

We kept seeing signs of the desert, but they became fewer and fewer. Yucca and cacti were dwindling, pine trees were taking over, and water was sometimes abundant.

We saw an actual river, too — that’s something we weren’t used to in the desert. It was just a small one — the south fork of the Kern River — but it was a whole lot more water than we were used to.

Camped next to the river, in the early afternoon, we ran into Bobber. He was taking it slow up to Independence, where he was scheduled to meet family. We talked about resupplies, Wonky, and what to do about the snow that remained in the Sierras. There had been some late-season snowfall, apparently, so getting through the high passes could be hard.

We wanted to get to the Kennedy Meadows General Store today, so we moved on. Kennedy Meadows is a small town that’s the traditional last resupply before the Sierras start.

On the way, we reached mile 700, which most people consider the approximate end of the desert.

Late in the day, we got to the road to Kennedy Meadows, and were talking about which way the store was, when Sprout showed up. He was walking down the road, coming from the store.

“It’s closed” he told us. “And, they turned the water and electricity off for the night, and their outhouses are full. So there isn’t much there until tomorrow morning, unless you really want to sleep on their porch with 30 other hikers. If you need water, you should get it from the Kern river before you go to the store. I’m going to sleep about a mile upstream.”

We set up on the banks of the Kern River, just off the road. It was getting dark. Hopefully, we can make the pancake breakfast tomorrow.

Ridgecrest had been nice. Most everything we’d needed to buy had been there, and we’d stopped at a nearby brewery called Indian Wells.

Starting again at Walker Pass was hard. The trail angels had packed up and gone.

On the way out, we noticed a small monument, explaining the pass’s history.

We went up and down hills all day. Now, though, we were far enough north that we were entering and exiting desert as the altitude changed. It also gradually got less dry and more tree-covered throughout the day.

Having just been in town had some advantages. With access to a whole grocery store, I had many ingredients for my lunch.

After lunch, things started looking less like a desert in some directions.

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.