Day 47-49: The Desert (Reprise)

May 21-23; Mile 566-602

Day 47

I woke up refreshed and clean in a hotel room in Tehachapi. In the afternoon I went to a movie with Portal and Em; we saw “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I cried for half of part two, and based on the snuffling sounds next to me, I wasn’t the only one.

We walked out of the dark theater into the bright afternoon sun in a daze. The three of us walked over to the Best Western for DD’s pool party, and it was quite the context switch. I saw hikers I hadn’t seen in weeks, new people, folks I’d been hiking with the past few days – everyone lounged in the sun and hot water, laughing and sharing stories from the trail.

Day 48

Finja and I loaded our packs with eight days of food and 4-5L of water. The total weight was almost a third of my body weight, and I dreaded the climbs ahead. I left Dolphin with my town dress and then we were off to the bakery to find a hitch out of town.

The star taxi guy pulled up within five minutes and offered a ride for $25. I demurred; Finja came back and offered $10 for the ride – mostly as a joke – but he agreed, and so we both pitched in $5 and were at the trailhead in 15 minutes.

I signed the trail register as Finja ate the pastry she’d bought at the bakery, and chuckled at the entry where someone had said they felt like Cheryl Strayed from ‘Wild.’ My hulking pack sure felt monstrous, too.

The trail paralleled the highway for a while before beginning to climb. Thankfully it was not too windy, just enough to keep the temperature down. I walked past Joshua trees and got a better view of the wind farms to the south. Around noon I took a break near a campsite, and Adam hiked up and paused to chat.

“I saw in the trail register before Tehachapi that you wrote ‘F this wind.’ Of course I chuckled, but then I was worried – you can’t have a trail name Stormy and be against the wind. The PCTA is going to rescind that name if you’re not careful.”

We had a good laugh before he continued on, and soon after I was following along as the trail crested the high point of the ridge and began to follow a rutted, rocky forest road for several miles before delivering me to the base of a small contingent of wind turbines.

Every distant range of peaks had me wondering: are those the Sierras? I was ready to be out of the desert, but for today I was just glad that I had made it 17 miles to the water. There was a trickling spring with a metal trough and a resident frog that everyone had camped around. I walked down the forest road at sunset to watch the clouds turn pink before retreating into my tent for another dusty, windy night.

Day 49

I woke at 5:30 and almost everyone had already left. I decided to eat my breakfast there so that I wouldn’t have to carry extra water – it was about 20 miles until the next water source.

The trail was gradual at first, passing through grasslands and oak groves into pine forest. There were granite boulders lying alongside the path, often the perfect height to rest my pack and take the weight off my legs.

The desert seemed to be offering up a reprise of all I’d seen over the past seven weeks. There were blooming prickly pear cacti, shady oak trees, scrub brush and sage, towering pines, and no water. And there were sections of downed trees I had to scramble over, just to keep things interesting. I thought the carries had been hard before, but they were nothing compared to this section: day after day of hiking with 17, 20, 15, 18, 16-mile water carries.

I had a nice long lunch break in the shade under a tree and was joined by James. I almost dozed off with my feet propped up on a branch. After that was a series of hot, tough climbs. My feet and legs were tired, and my hourly breaks grew longer as the day wore on. I met a family hiking the trail with a five-year-old named “Bedtime” and saw them again at the 600-mile marker.

“How’s your hike?” the dad asked.

“Good, but I wish I was about 100 miles ahead.”

“Well we passed into the Sierra terrain sometime today, right? Now there’s granite rocks and pine trees – we’ve made it.”

And he was right; the terrain certainly had changed from the scrub brush and cacti that we’d passed leaving Tehachapi. I was filled with hope that we had ascended into the pines for the last time. But there were still 100 miles of desert between me and Kennedy Meadows, and the hardest part was yet to come.