The following day (day 18) we would be passing the 500 mile marker which was cause for celebration even if Alyssa and I hadn’t hiked all the miles up to that point, but that excitement helped get us moving in the morning. I may have shed a few tears out of exhaustion and fear that day, but we set a new mileage record and covered 23.48 miles that day. As we got later into the evening I became tired and allowed my mind to run wild with fear, but when we got to the area we intended to camp in, we searched long and hard until we found a decently sheltered spot and though we could hear the storm violent above us, the wind that reached us didn’t feel much worse than what we were used to. Yet we climbed on because we did not have a choice. and the wind currently battering us (which was scaring me enough) was only 21 mph. Alyssa looked up the wind forecast and my stomach sank further: 40 mph gusts would be setting in around 8 p.m. The one night on the trail with strong winds I’d experienced thus far had been extremely scary with my tent curving so much in the wind, I thought the poles would snap, so this news made me extremely uneasy. At a break in the middle of the day, I turned my phone off airplane mode and got a text from my dad alerting me that the mountain range we were traveling through was expecting a windstorm that night. I had been bracing myself for the brutal heat the other hikers at Hiker Heaven had warned me about, but there was strong gusty wind all day that kept us fairly cool. I was filled with adrenaline all morning and equal amounts of climbing and descending made the miles feel fairly easy. We woke up early the following morning (day 17) and set out with a goal of crushing 24 miles that day. I set up my tent, ate 2 tortillas and an avocado, and Alyssa arrived just before I fell asleep. Nighthiking scares me and it seems the wilderness is suddenly filled with more scary things-every bush could be a poodle dog bush or poison oak and every noise in the distance could be a mountain lion-but I enjoyed those 3 miles of fear. I ended up hiking around 11 miles that afternoon: first climbing up switchbacks along a cluster of beautiful green rolling hills, followed by winding down through a small forest and then along a ridge overlooking a lake as the sky produced a brilliant red sunset (the most magnificent I have seen on trail so far), and ending with 3 miles in the light of my headlamp. I am much taller than Alyssa so my strides are longer, and leaving Agua Dulce I made the decision to go my pace rather than Alyssa’s and meet up with her at camp later. A big part of why I wanted to do this hike was to challenge myself and push my body to the limit, so I was excited to complete a string of 20+ mile days to get to Tehachapi. My goal was to hike at least 10 miles that day which would then give us 94 miles to complete in 4.5 days (I wanted to get there no later than noon on Saturday) which seemed like an appropriate challenge. My dad was meeting us in Tehachapi the following Saturday meaning we had less than a week to hike 104 miles-a faster pace than we’d been hiking. The miles immediately after leaving Agua Dulce included lots of climbing and attempting that at the peak of the sun’s power sounded miserable.Īlyssa and I said goodbye to our new friends and left the Saufley’s home around 3:30 p.m. Alyssa and I decided we would leave Hiker Heaven in the late afternoon. The super bloom would continue but hiking in the middle of the day when the sun was at its hottest would be foolish. We were in the true desert again, meaning low elevation, scorching temperatures, long waterless stretches, very little shade and creepy critters like scorpions and rattlesnakes. No snow to worry about until Walker Pass which was nearly 200 miles ahead at PCT mile marker 650, but as a trade-off, other reported that the heat to come would be crushing. It was thrilling to hear stories from those who had been southbound section hiking–a glimpse into the future. Due to all of the snow this year, many who had set out to attempt a thruhike have since changed their plan to instead complete a string of section hikes along the trail, and because of this, many of the hikers I overlapped with at Hiker Heaven had seen different parts of the trail than I had. While my body was enjoying the rest, I was enjoying the company of lots of other hikers, many of whom I’d never met before. The morning I wrote my last post I was relaxing at Hiker Heaven (the home of the well known trail angels the Saufley’s in Agua Dulce).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |