PCT Day 50
June 19 2021
Mile: 572.9 to 592.9
Start: sheltered juniper grove campsite outside Tehachapi
Finish: spacious tree campsite and meadow, aka, the Beyoncé campsite
At 5:15am, we were up and tearing down our tent so we could hike to the next spring before the temperature became dangerously hot. We tore out of camp, trekking downwards on an ATV road for a few miles. We saw our old friend Chainsaw who is named so because he snored so loudly that it sounded like he was cutting down trees in his sleep. The trail took us through more dry, dusty and exposed desert where ongoing wind turbines were being assembled as the renewable energy projects in the area expanded. We saw construction workers, cranes, road graders and giant fan blades stacked up next to construction sites. The company installing the turbines had redirected the trail in this section and put up orange safety netting and signage the entire 9-mile-long construction project, which is very kind and considerate.
Shannon almost fell down the trail at one point and when I went to go see if he was okay he yelled at me to stay back. I quickly realized that he had almost stepped on the head of a very well camouflaged rattlesnake that was sunning itself on a rock. Shannon didn’t see the snake until his foot was almost on top of its head and the rattler’s head puffed up. Shannon said the only thing that stopped him from getting bit was the fact that he had splinted his broken hiking pole last night at camp with a stick, rubber band and duct tape, and was able to use the hiking poles to vault over the pissed off rattlesnake. Yikes! We watched the snake disappear into the rocks after he rattled his tail at us in irritation at having disturbed his perfect sunning spot. That got our heart rates up!
Later in the morning we arrived at the Golden Oak Spring, which was the first reliable water source since the town of Tehachapi 17 miles away. Looking at the large amounts of shade and basin of spring water we decided that it was probably the perfect place to spend an afternoon siesta. Chainsaw joined us and we ate lunch, chatted about trail gossip and talked about the awful heat stroke death of the woman PCT hiker a few days ago. At 10am it had already been close to 95 degrees and rising so we cooled off in theshade where it was marginally cooler. In the late afternoon a raven clucked in the distance, and since we were bored we clucked back at him, trying to mimic his sounds. The ravens out here make unusual sounds that remind you of someone playing a wooden percussion instrument, or one of those wooden frogs with the ridges on the back that you rub with a stick or a mallet. Well, this raven must have been just as bored as we were in the hot afternoon stillness because he kept flying closer and closer until he was right above us in the trees clucking at us in different patterns and rhythms that we tried to mimic. I called it “Shannon’s talking to the locals” and the curious bird kept communicating with us via a series of clucks and snapping sounds for a good 15 or 20 minutes. It was pretty cool that we were talking to a wild raven! We hoped that we’re only saying polite and friendly things to him in Ravenese.
After lunch, we passed out from a delicious Spanish lentil rice and electrolyte drinks, hanging out in our tent to keep the annoying flies and biting midges away. We felt like stuck pigs again sweating so much in the tent even with the four doors open for a breeze. We kept sliding off our sleeping pads covered in sweat and my yellow pad was slowly turning a tan color with brown rivulets of mud stains from my dusty body mixing with sweat. Nasty, nasty, nasty.
Post-siesta, Shannon and I collected water from the piped spring where below dozens of tadpoles swam in the cool, clear water trough. It was a gorgeous sight for sore eyes seeing so much water in the dry desert and we struggled to leave the basin of water knowing that the next few days were going to be us hiking dozens of miles from spring to spring topped off by a 43 mile long waterless stretch coming up. Reluctantly we left the spring and our raven friend around 5pm to head out through more dry desert construction sites. Rash-inducing poodle dog bush dominated parts of the trail where you least expected it so you had to be vigilant while hiking to not brush up against the plant. We saw several deer browsing the dried up landscape for greenery to eat and an especially strong looking 6-pointer buck with his antlers still in velvet who trotted across the hillsides in the setting sun.
As night came on, we hiked through the dark to a glorious grove of trees, where we found dozens of flat, beautiful shaded campsites around 10pm. We decided to set up tent, hanging our food high in the trees since the comments in our navigation app talked about bears in the area. And when I went to go pee, I swore I saw some eyes looking back at us. We brought out my phone to listen to music, being the only ones in the campsite. I kept telling Shannon that “…I swear this is the last Beyoncé song on my playlist!” but having no real idea if it actually was. About 10 Beyoncé songs later, we finally called it a night and curled up in the breezy but sheltered campground, humming “Who runs the world? GIRLS!”
10 minutes into almost being asleep, an owl caught an unlucky rodent nearby that screeched so loudly that it woke us up with a start. The rest of the night was relatively quiet and we were just too exhausted from the hot temperatures to really give a crap about weird noises and passed out super hard under the bright light of the moon.