PCT Day 45
June 14 2021
Mile: 541.5 to 555.5
Start: Tyler Horse Canyon tentsite
Finish: Random tentsite with coyotes and windmills and a mountain lion skeleton in the trees
Neither of us really remember what happened during the day today as we were so exhausted from night hiking until about 3am that we barely woke up when other hikers arrived at the canyon at 4:30am. Even though we did our best to estimate where the sun would come up in the morning, under the two large oak trees, Shannon and I woke up baking at 7am. The sun cooked us in our tent as it rose over the canyon walls and hit the only spot where the limbs of our oak tree didn’t touch the ground. Gosh darn it! Grumpily, we moved our tent closer to Hooch who had wisely picked out a great shaded spot wedged low between the two oak trees.
We slept until about 11am when a particularly loud and self-unaware hiker who shall not be named from New Hampshire showed up and didn’t shut up. There were probably 10 or 12 hikers now sleeping under the shade tree, everyone exhausted after a long night of hiking in the dark. G. started yelling while everyone else was trying to sleep. If the other hikers weren’t sleeping, they were whispering to be respectful of the tired hikers. Several hikers gave her the shushing finger and stink eyes to be quiet but she didn’t get the hint. Finally her hiking partner told her to be quiet because everyone was sleeping and she shut up. Gahhhhh we were so grumpy and couldn’t wait til she left!
All day was a blur between eating ramen noodles, drinking electrolytes and passing out in the tent. It was so hot out with the heat wave that even in the shade you would wake up in your tent to slide around on your sleeping pad, lubed up in your own nasty sweat like a fat juicy pig roasting over a fire. We slept feverishly, dust sticking to our sweaty bodies and collecting in mud trails and pools all over our sleeping pads. Tiny ants crawled over the tent and flies buzzed nonstop trying to get inside.
When you were thirsty, you walked up the canyon a ways until the dry sand turned to slick brown mud with a salty rim on the rocks. You kept walking until the sludge turned green and shiny tepid mud puddles filled with flies. Strolling past the nasty mud pies, you’d find some very shallow 1 to 2 inch deep puddles where you could very carefully scoop water up with your pot, pouring it into the water filter bag to observe mud particles, rocks and swimming insect larvae hanging out in your drinking water. You would scoop until the puddle got too silty and muddy, and then move upstream, watching out for mountain lions waiting to surprise you, all the while getting baked by the sun. The water filter would clog up as the filter worked overtime to give you clear tepid water that tasted like mud and rock. As the water slowly trickled out through the filter, you’d lick your lips thirstily in anticipation to drink the weird tasting water but at least it wouldn’t give you giardia or some other waterborne illness. To improve the taste, add however many packets of drink mix and electrolytes in the water to make it drinkable. Drink up, stay somewhat hydrated, rinse and repeat.
Once your water ran out, you would trudge up canyon again to get water, then you passed out for a nap covered in sweat and grime and repeat until the temperature dropped from 110 degrees to a balmy 95F. Several bold hikers started leaving camp around 4pm while it was still pretty warm, saying sayonara to the shade and headed out to the hot trail. Shannon and I left our oak tree sanctuary at 6pm to head over the mountainside and get some miles in. We traveled through unshaded desert, underneath towering windmills and over dirt bike trails that went straight up and down the mountainside. A couple of landslides had taken out the trail in places so you had to navigate carefully as to not fall down the mountainside. Burnt trees littered the landscape and the sunset illuminated the shriveled foliage against the smoggy sky, the writhing silhouettes outlined in blazing rich oranges, peaches, yellows and teals.
We stopped at a hiker oasis where a wonderful Trail Angel named Daniel had hiked out chairs, umbrellas, water and a snack cupboard for hikers to rest and relax at. Solar powered Christmas lights added beautiful ambience in the early night skies and we sat with a bunch of hikers in the dark laughing, tooting (of course) and shooting the shit for a few minutes. Despite the ongoing heatwave, it actually started to get cold with the sweat cooling on our bodies and we all night hiked on.
In the dark we caught the glow of two yellow eyes next to the trail and we jumped at a fox who could give two hoots about us as he pounced on kangaroo rats for his dinnertime. We talked to a hiker named Topless (named so because he hiked without a shirt on) who was super kind. We chatted with him until Shannon’s headlamp batteries failed and we stopped to change them. After Topless went on without us, we kept seeing eyes looking back at us in the dark which made my adrenaline flow like crazy as we tried to discern if it was time for fight or flight. Your mind jumps to conclusions in the dark and it was a bit stressful trying to figure out if it was a hungry mountain lion staring back at you or if it was just a harmless deer dazzled by the headlights.
After a few hours of jumping every now and then at what always turned out to be deer eyes, we got a little exhausted from being hyped up all the time so we decided it was time to set up tent. Around midnight we found a flattish spot for camping and decided to stop hiking to catch a few hours of sleep. When I went to brush my teeth, I caught a pair of very yellow eyes looking back at me and then they slinked away into the bush. Deer have green eyes, and yellow eyes can be anything like a coyote, a raccoon, a fox or a wild cat like a bobcat…or a mountain lion. The eyes were a couple feet off the ground which made me a little nervous that it was a bigger predatory animal so I walked backwards to the tent, facing the spot where the yellow eyes had disappeared.
At the tent I told Shannon about the eyes and grabbed my phone. I started blasting such lovely songs by artists Cardi B, Lil Jon with his Turn Down for What and other loud and obnoxious jams. The loud music seemed to work and whatever was looking at us in the bush ended up leaving us alone. As I was going to sleep, I took a final look at the Guthook navigation app and someone had commented that right next to where we were camping was a tree with a mountain lion skeleton in it. Yikes!! We definitely didn’t look for the mountain lion skeleton in the dark and hoped that whatever was in the bushes would leave us alone for the next four or five hours of sleep.
