PCT Day 41
June 10 2021
Mile: 454.4 to 478.2 (23.8 miles)
Start: tenting in an abandoned parking lot in the town of Agua Dulce
Finish: Green Valley Fire Station tentsite under pine trees
Shannon and I woke up while the sky was still dark in the early morning and hurriedly packed away our tent so as not to attract attention from locals. Our campsite was not the most ideal as we were essentially camped out in an abandoned parking lot next to closed down retail shops impacted by the Covid pandemic. The lot was dusty and filled with trash and glass shards. While we still had energy last night we had picked up some of the trash and put it in a trashcan, mainly because we didn’t want animals to come snuffling by our tent looking for food.
Shannon told me all about the coyote packs that had kept him up for an hour around midnight as they howled like crazy across the street and behind us. Somehow I had slept through the coyotes but guessed that they probably didn’t come too close to us. Out in the parking lot, any noise echoed loudly from the little natural amphitheater made by stacked dirt and concrete retaining walls so everything sounded louder than it was.
We were out hiking on the PCT a little before 6am and followed the trail through the tiny town on sidewalks and shoulders next to busy roads with lots of commuter traffic. The day was starting to get hot already in the valley that the town of Agua Dulce was in and we were excited to get out of the heat and hike up into the cooler high mountain altitudes. We trekked up past powerlines and a movie set that was being built in the distance. The trail ascended up into rolling burnt hillsides as all of the foliage had been roasted in a huge fire that happened here in the past few years. The landscape was reminiscent of Iceland’s barren volcanic mountains that we’d hiked through a couple years ago and the weather was just as windy out here in California as it was in Iceland.
While we were hiking, we heard a clatter of rocks ahead of us and froze because we didn’t know if it was a rockslide or something else. A few hundred feet ahead of us we saw a mama deer with two baby fawns in tow running up the mountainside away from us. It was good to see wildlife returning back to an area that had been so ravaged by fire and gave us hope that the area would heal.
Burnt agave hearts looked like charred pineapples sticking out of the ground and appeared as though someone had been pit roasting the agave hearts to make tequila. Charred broken limbs of trees rose out of the dirt like an army of twisted zombies rising from the grave. Besides the ashen dirt and destroyed bushes and trees, there were new green plants growing everywhere which was really exciting after such a huge burn in the hillsides. You could tell with the harsh winds and waterless environment that it would be a long healing process for the green growth to return substantially but it was already starting.
At the top of the peak, we lingered long enough to admire the landscape while chowing down on some well-deserved snacks. This side of the mountain had been spared from the wrath of the fire and the trail descended through shaded forests of scrub oak trees where we startled quails and doves roosting in the branches. At one point while hiking, Shannon marveled at how many miles that we had crushed already in the coolness of the early morning. I laughed because I’ve been trying to get him to wake up early for a while, but it’s always been a struggle! You can do so many more miles if you wake up early in the morning while it’s still cool, instead of, you know, starting hiking at 9am when you’ve already lost 3-4 hours of comfortable hiking weather.
At the bottom of the mountain, the trail crossed the road where a beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous Trail Angel had supplied Pacific Crest Trail hikers with gallons of water under a huge live oak tree. The water was especially welcomed because there was no water source around here anymore as they’d all dried up due to the ongoing droughts in Southern California. In the shade of the massive oak tree was a cooler with cold electrolyte drinks and fruit which was a magical discovery for us. We decided to take a quick break under the tree to enjoy the shade, the cool water and the fresh fruit that we didn’t even realize that we’d been craving. While we were relaxing, each of us took turns using the bathroom in the woods as we carefully dodged bushes of rash-inducing poison oak.
As we were hanging out, we met Maya who was a super cool older lady hiking with her husband. The couple had a van that they stayed in and were using to shuttle themselves north on the Pacific Crest Trail. Jay would drop Maya off in the morning to hike north, while he drove around the backroads to park the van at the next trail crossing on a road. Jay then would hike south on the PCT towards Maya from their van’s parking spot and would regroup with her on the trail. Maya and Jay met on a kibbutz in Israel, which is like a farming community where individuals have no possessions and everything’s democratic. Maya told us all about her adventures and we laughed and learned with her. After a while of chatting and hanging out, we said goodbye to start hiking again up the hot trail.
The afternoon on the trail was slogging through soft white sands, winding up and down exposed switchbacks and thumping down hard packed clay paths. The sun beat down on us relentlessly as there was no shade to cover us since fires had ravaged this part of the mountain and burned all of the trees long ago. The ground reflected heat waves off of the trail and with no shade to cover us from the sun beating down it was a pretty miserable afternoon. Shannon said he didn’t need to eat lunch but I was starving and we thankfully stopped in a partially shaded campsite where we made some ramen noodles, rehydrated our bodies with electrolyte drink mix and rested in the shade of a flat campsite. I was running pretty low on water at this point and the next source wasn’t for another six or seven miles but I drank up since we weren’t that far away from the fire station where there was guaranteed to be water available from a hose there. If we hadn’t had the water cache provided by the anonymous Trail Angel at the oak tree, it would’ve been a dangerous day hiking because there wouldn’t have been water since the spigot at the Mexican restaurant way back in Agua Dulce.
As we were resting in the shaded campsite, we met Jay hiking south and then he shortly ran into Maya where they turned back north and they both hiked past us. We packed up shortly after they had passed by and it was still very hot but we had to get moving because our water supply was dwindling. We popped in our headphones and audiobooks and podcasts to help distract us and get the miles done faster. Somehow listening to real life stories of murder and comedy on the “My Favorite Murder” podcast helped cover the miles.
Shannon and I passed a couple hikers resting in the shade where a large wooden sign stood. We recognized some of the names of the winners of “The Leona Divide Trail 50 miler” race sign that had been posted over the years. One of the names was famous ultramarathoner and Appalachian Trail record setter Scott Jurek’s name up there quite a few times. A few years ago he had just (barely) broken the record for Fastest Known Time (FKT) of completing the entire 2,189-mile-long Appalachian Trail while being supported by a crew. Jennifer Pharr Davis held that record for a while and since both of them hiked the record has been shattered almost yearly. It was cool to see Scott’s name up there on the race results!
About 3 miles from the fire station where the next water source was, I ran out of water but didn’t tell Shannon until we were 2 miles away and I had started feeling lightheaded. It was so hot and I tried so hard to be strong because it was only a few miles until the next water, but I could feel that I was getting dehydrated and loopy. Shannon shared some of his water with me which was really kind of him. I think one of the medications I take makes me extra thirsty because almost all of the time when we start with the same 3 liters of water and I run out, Shannon still has 1-2 liters of water left which means 1) he’s secretly a camel, 2) he’s super dehydrated or 3) I’m drinking way more H2O than a normal person. We think it’s probably my meds that make me thirsty.
We descended off the stinkin’ hot mountain after some long switchbacks and stopped just before a busy road where we found a beautiful water cache. Shannon and I each drank a liter of water while talking to G. and C. from New Hampshire. They were brother and sister-in-law and had spread out their gear all across the water cache so it was a little hard to find a spot to sit in the shade. When we commented off handedly about all of the overgrown bushes of poison oak on the PCT today, they told us matter-of-factly that there wasn’t any poison oak on the trail, even though we had literally walked through fields of it today. They were very opinionated New Englanders and it was their way or the highway. I was quickly reminded about what it was like to grow up there and it made me sigh deeply. They said we could camp near them, but they had taken the best spots. Every other tentsite either had their gear covering the spots or it was hard, slanted, lumpy ground or had swarms of ballistic ants or active animal dens next to the tent sites. We decided it would be less stressful to go down the street and camp at the fire station.
The two of them kept complaining that there was no cell service down here in the forested valley far away from everything in the wilderness. Well, yeah we’re in the middle of nowhere in a canyon, what do you expect – to be able to stream Netflix? When we asked if they checked at the fire station .2 miles down the road for cell service they complained that it was too far and that they didn’t want to camp there because it was going to be too loud at the fire station for them to sleep, even though they hadn’t walked down there. We were kind of annoyed talking to them and didn’t want to deal with any drama at the end of a long day. We left them at their water cache to walk the .2 miles down the road to the fire station which was actually gorgeous and quiet.
The fire station was a residency for firefighters in training or something like that and had a nice picnic pavilion, water hose, trash cans and comfy campsites under enormous pine trees with probably the largest pine cones that we’d ever seen in our whole dang lives. We set up our tent while we admired the giant elk and deer antlers that the firefighters had collected and put on display. I was definitely a little dehydrated and didn’t realize how bad it was until I tried to eat my dinner and almost threw up. My nausea hit all of a sudden and the homemade lentil pasta, veggies and meat that I was eating almost came right back up. I pushed it aside. Instead I sipped on electrolyte drink mix and water, shivering slightly. Thank goodness for the onsite trash because otherwise I would’ve had to carry out my heavy rehydrated meal for several days. Luckily I was able to throw out the rest of my meal, especially since Shannon was so full and couldn’t eat it, and it wouldn’t stay good overnight because of the heat.
We hung our food up on a pine branch because there were lots of animal holes in the ground like ground squirrels, chipmunks, mice and kangaroo rats. As the sun set, we literally drank water from a fire hose (but only after we filtered it) and then immediately went to bed. Our tent was snuggled under huge pine trees on a soft bed of pine needles, barely visible from the backside of the fire station.
During the night we heard an animal jumping around our tent which was probably a kangaroo rat or two. It was good we hung up our food so the little critters didn’t chew our tent or backpacks to get at our food. We also heard a bobcat hollering on the hillside for a while which was kind of cool. The road was far away enough from our tentsite and the pine tree branches hushed enough of the noise that sleep came immediately. It was very, very nice.