PCT Day 24
Mile: 266.1 to 275.0
Start: Robinhood resort hotel, Big Bear Lake, California
Finish: Caribou Creek tentsite (aka Camp Twinkie)
At 4:15am, I rolled out of bed, checked the UAV forecast app on my phone (UAV = Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) which is like the weather forecast for flying drones safely since I was hoping to get some sunrise shots over the lake this morning. Wind wasn’t too rough, the no fly zones for a small airport were on the other side of the lake so I wouldn’t fly too far and there weren’t any geomagnetic storms from the sun that would affect the GPS accuracy. It looked like a great morning to fly, which has been very rare indeed on the trail, mainly because of how windy it’s been in the mountains and desert! I also brushed up on a couple of articles about flying drones over bodies of water and what hazards to watch out for. I didn’t realize that seagulls would apparently attack drones if they got the chance and so I crossed my fingers there wouldn’t be any gulls flying over the shores of Big Bear Lake. If there were lots of “rats with wings,” I probably wouldn’t risk the chance of seagulls attacking the drone and would just come back to the hotel.
In the darkness of the wood paneled hotel room, I unfolded my little 1 ounce “town backpack” (aka my Hiker Trash purse) and stuffed my drone, some extra batteries, the controller and a rain jacket into the yellow silnylon pack. I quietly said goodbye to Shannon who was still groggily snoring, checked my phone for directions to the lake a couple blocks away and closed the hotel door. Outside the air was brisk and still, smelling vaguely of forest fires in the air and twilight hushed the surrounding mountains in heavy navy blues. The usual tourist-filled streets were deserted and silent this morning and I sauntered unimpeded by foot or car traffic down to the beach on Big Bear Lake.
A pair of coal-feathered ravens and several mallard ducks and lady ducks quacked sleepily around the shore. The water on Big Bear Lake was silent, still and shimmering this morning in the predawn light. As the sun started to rise over the mountains to the east, I caught some amazing footage over the marina and the sleepy town of Big Bear City as I was flying the drone. No seagulls came and attacked me which was great! Shannon ended up walking down to the beach with his camping pot filled high to the brim with coffee to check on me.
After we flew the drone, we walked back to the hotel to pack up a little bit before breakfast at the Teddy Bear Cafe down the street. We spent a couple hours journaling and then we left with our heavy packs to go mail a few things at the Post Office, we ran into hiker friend Haiku. He joined us after having spent the night at Kenny’s hostel which he said was amazing with beer, BBQ on the back porch and home cooked breakfasts and rides to town.
We stopped at the Crepe Cafe where we drank tea, coffee and blogged after running to Sara from Quebec, who was speaking French to someone on the phone. After about an hour, we picked up our packs and wandered off to the Himalayan restaurant, where we had some delicious lamb biryani and chicken tikka masala that we shared. The waiter was super kind and asked us all sorts of questions about the PCT, and wished us good luck as we left.
We tried to catch a Lyft or an Uber back to the trailhead, but our good old reliable driver Heather wasn’t working. We called a guy named Carl, who was a local taxi driver and he said he’d be about five minutes to come pick us up, which was amazing. Talk about some service! Carl was on his way to weed whack the church lawn, but he stopped to pick us up and headed back to the trail generously. He was super sweet, and even though his car had no seatbelts that I could find, when I searched for them I found a pamphlet wedged in the seat from 2002. The doors didn’t open either from the inside and you had to jiggle this switch and that latch just right while having someone outside to get you out of the car. We’ve all had one of those cars before!
But regardless of his vehicle, Carl told us about how the hills in the area used to have gold mines, but no one ever struck the big one so the mining operations folded. There are still local legends about the gold in the hills and we joked about how Shannon I were going to get so distracted on the PCT and start digging for gold and end up living in Big Bear Lake. Carl thought that was pretty funny.
Back on the trail with full bellies, we wandered in and out of Joshua Trees and Yerba Santa, which looks like the dreaded Poodle Dog Bush. We met a guy who had told us when he was hiking just out of town 10 minutes along the trail, a mountain lion bounded across the trail in front of him and into the woods. Yikes!! I’m just glad I didn’t know that when we hiked out of Big Bear.
Most of the trail today was a huge burn zone from past forest fires that gave way to swaths of blister- and rash-inducing Poodle Dog Bush which we stayed far away from. The trail climbed up a hill a bit and Shannon recounted an hour-long summary of his whole 34-hour-long Abraham Lincoln audiobook for my entertainment. The hour-long summary was pushing it with the amount of detail he was telling me, but it kept me sort of entertained and my mind off the hill climb.
Up ahead on the trail we saw a young guy jamming out and dancing to music and we passed him after yelling “Hey!” at him twice loudly. He finally heard us and we commented that he must have been listening to some good music. We passed him and we didn’t have a very eventful afternoon until we hit the “Jurassic Park” section on the trail where these crazy birds were jostling the bushes and making what sounded just like Velociraptor noises. I felt like Newman when he gets eaten by dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park movie!!
When we descended to the water source, two girls and a guy hiker were on the bridge collecting water from the creek. The guy told us he was a bridge troll and that we had to answer three questions to get across the bridge. We all laughed at the guy and he kept a straight face. The first troll toll question was, “What is your Bitcoin purse password?” Who is this guy?! We burst out into laughter and I told him, “My password is 1-2-3-4-5.”
We later sat down at the campsite with CatDog who was a hilarious construction worker from Colorado. He told us the story of when he had night hiked across the San Jacinto Mountains after strong winds knocked his tent over. On his way almost to the bottom of the mountainside, CatDog almost got attacked by a freakin badger! He thought it was a skunk at first, but it was pretty aggressive, a bit larger than a skunk and only stopped short on the rocks 10-15 feet from him in the pitch dark. American badgers can be really aggressive – he was so lucky he didn’t get bit!
We laughed so much with our new friend CatDog while setting up our tent, collecting water from the clear still pools of the creek and checking out some Trail Magic someone had left at camp which turned out to be a garbage bag full of Twinkies. We decided to name the tentsite “Camp Twinkie” and I’m pretty sure Shannon ate 2 or 3 Twinkies before dinner. Despite not having flowing water, the nearby creek water was clear enough and tasted great after filtering it which was not always the case out in the desert.
We ate dinner with CatDog and Rooster (who had been the hiker jamming out to his music on the trail earlier this afternoon) and he told us about being a mathematician. Rooster taught us a combinatorial game called Nim using piles of rocks spread out on a sleeping pad. We had a hilarious dinner and met a couple of girls hiking together named Brown Sugar, Planner and Gaiter. Later on, a young guy named Conrad came by and hung out with the girls. We laughed so much over dinner and had a wonderful evening watching the cars go up the backroads at Camp Twinkie and the moon rising over the pine trees.
