PCT Day 54 to 57
June 23 to 26, 2021
Mile: 651.5 to 668.7
Start: The town of Kernville via Walker Pass
Finish: Spanish Needle Creek
Shannon and I both needed a mental break from the desert and so we relaxed in the tiny riverside town of Kernville for a few days where the temperatures were slightly cooler. We spent several days enjoying getting out of the desert heat by swimming in pools and in the river, floating down the “Killer Kern” River and eating yummy food. We heard that the Kern River claims people’s lives yearly and a quick Wikipedia search said that 315 people have drowned in the Kern River in the past 53 years — that’s like 6 people a year who die in the Killer Kern! The guy the river is named after actually almost died in it. Sheesh!
The Kern River wasn’t as deadly as it usually is due to the low snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the ongoing drought in California. The day that we floated from the Rivernook Campground to downtown Kernville we thought our tubing ride would be much more chill than it actually was. As we floated down the river on our $5 gas station tubes, adult beverages in hand, we started seeing people floating down the river wearing life jackets on sturdy, reinforced tubes. Several whitewater kayakers with helmets and life jackets paddled past us down the same river and we started to ask ourselves if we knew what we were getting into. Soon enough we hit rapids and at a few points we definitely went down some Class II+ and III- whitewater rapids where we weren’t sure if our tubes were gonna make it. By a stroke of luck of the hiking gods, we didn’t pop the cheap tubes we’d found at the PCT campground despite getting caught up on rocks. There were times where I had to even pull out some of my old whitewater kayaking techniques to get over the mini waterfalls and standing waves. It was nutso!
A long hour after leaving camp, we successfully floated downtown to the local park, passing trout fishermen, people swimming in the river with water guns that they shot at us and some aggressive whitewater rapids. We were glad to be done floating, and realized that even when the water level is low, the Killer Kern River is not really a river to be drinking White Claws and beer on. Our mantra we recited while floating, “Less rapids, more chill” never came to fruition and we felt like we needed some stiff drinks after surviving the rapids.
Shannon and I hiked up the road back to the campground where we packed up our stuff to stay at a hotel. The owner was super sweet and hiker friendly and we were able to relax in some air conditioning, finally do laundry after 2 weeks of not having a laundry machine and treated ourselves to a fancy steak dinner at Ewing’s on the River.
The next day we decided we really didn’t want to leave town just yet and grabbed another hotel room to wait out the stupidly aggressive heat wave of 110 degrees. We took a spin at the local coffee shop and then checked out the Kernville Museum which was actually awesome for such a tiny place . We saw mammoth tusks and fossilized shark’s teeth found in the area. There were tons of Native American artifacts and crafts from local tribes and medals from the local Olympian whitewater kayaking champs. We learned all about gold mining and twenty-mule teams and how people got really sick from the mercury that was used to extract the gold from the raw ore. In modern times, Kernville had been not only a hydroelectric energy hub but also a place were lots of movies had been filmed. The volunteers were so sweet and gave us personal tours of the entire place.
We cooked steak on the hotel grill while drinking canned wine and beer on the riverbanks. I chased some loud frogs in the river and saw the biggest crawdad that I’d ever seen – he was the size of a lobster! When I went to go tell Shannon about the granddaddy of all crawdads, he didn’t believe me and thought it was the wine talking. I made him come down to the water, showed him the enormous crawfish and his jaw dropped. Shannon ended up catching the granddaddy of all crawdads and it must have been 10 or 12 inches long. It truly was like a freakin lobster.
The next day, we hung out and grabbed some food from the grocery store. $3 bourbon marinated tri-tip tacos? Yes please! Unfortunately this evening we stayed at a hotel next to legitimate meth heads which was exhausting. We didn’t get much sleep because they were throwing things at each other all night, had a noisy baby (yikes), and were up all night, yelling and talking nonstop. The only time it was somewhat quiet was 2 to 4am, and even with earplugs, it was hard not to hear things being thrown at the wall. Shannon and I left the hotel to catch the 5:30am bus out of town and surprise surprise, the meth heads were already awake and talking loudly outside our hotel room like they’re the only people on the planet. When they smiled with no front teeth and were talking a mile a minute just as the sun was barely rising, I rolled my eyes and walked away.
We were almost to the bus stop at 5:30 to head back to Walker Pass and we saw the bus show up to the bus stop. It rolled through the stop sign and took off, not stopping for us or traffic signs. We chased the bus down the empty streets of Kernville at 5:30am, waving our hands and yelling with our backpacks bouncing off our backs as we sprinted. The bus took off without a second glance and we missed our ride out of town. We cursed at the bus driver and not wanting to go back to the meth head hotel, we glumly walked over to the corner of the road to try hitchhiking since the next bus didn’t stop again for 6 hours.
We stood on the corner of the road for about an hour waiting for the light traffic to pick up. The only person who stopped was a guy who couldn’t give us a ride since he was just going a mile down the road but he just wanted to talk to us about his hitchhiking experience when he was younger. He was nice but we weren’t getting any rides when he was hanging out around us.
Finally, a young nurse heading to Lake Isabella pulled over and gave us a ride to “the T” which was an intersection where we could get a second hitch up to Walker Pass. She said her partner supported the Pacific Crest Trail Association in the area and was trying to get more hikers to come check out the town of Kernville. She also mentioned that her hospital administration didn’t believe in Covid so it’d been a really scary experience working there during the pandemic. We thanked her for the ride and her service, wishing her luck, and then stuck our thumbs out at “the T” for about another 15 to 20 minutes before a lady in a big truck pulled over. She asked if we were going to rob her and we said, “Um…no. We’re just PCT hikers looking to get a ride back up to Walker Pass so we could keep hiking to Canada.”
After that big question was out of the way, the lady was really friendly and told us about how she was going to see her son who was 25 years old. The lady herself barely appeared to be 25 and said she was actually almost 50! I was floored. I couldn’t help but ask her what her secret was to staying young and having great skin. She laughed, telling us the secret was drinking lots of water and smoking weed. Huh!
The lady gave us some goodies to go, including some water bottles for our last bit of desert journey, which was so kind of her. We got dropped off at the Walker Pass Campground again and re-walked the little less than a mile back to Walker Pasd. Shannon and I were only there an hour after we would have been if we had caught the bus, which was great because then we still had some early morning coolness to hike through the last parts of the desert. The desert terrain continued on with yellow gold grass toughs, and purple flower bushes surrounding the mountain sides. The sun heated up, and we were so ready to get back, or get the heck out of the desert. We passed by Mount Jenkins where a plaque honoring the late James Jenkins stood he had been a mountain near young mountaineer who wrote the first piece of tea guidebooks, but had died when he was only 27 after getting hit by a car while changing his tire. Shannon and I hiked carefully over miles of rock slides and scree slopes from the earthquakes that had happened in the area two years ago. The sharp rocks were nearly puncturing the soles of our very worn out shoes and making us wince in pain. If we caught the edge wrong beaver tail cactus bear grass and. Joshua trees line the trail but offered little shade for us. SHANNON I met skyline. A guy from Cincinnati who was named after the chili. Here’s why waiting for his hiking partner fun Burns, who would hike part of the PCT in 2019 with him, and they were finishing up part of the trail day and miss. He didn’t seem too happy with fun bonds as she hadn’t trained much for the trail that was only going one or one and a half miles an hour in the heat. We left them behind and headed to Joshua Tree spring were an overly bold squirrel came right up to our food, sniffing to see if we had anything good to eat. We threw rocks at him until he got the point. And then he went to grab. Drink some water from the spring, instead of rating our food, we cooked lunch, filtered water and chatted with fun bonds and skyline. Before passing out in the shade for naptime. A 5:30pm We woke up and hiked out into the next spring. Six miles away, catching some decently fresh black bear tracks on the trail. This stream, we collected water and moved on point two miles to the only campsite. For the next few miles. When we arrived, it was getting dark and someone was already camped there. We met splitz who is suffering from heat exhaustion and was getting off trail tomorrow morning. He had also hiked in 2019 and was checking out some of the best parts of the trail coming up in this year is. But he also didn’t train much and had gained back 90 pounds. He had decided to come back and hike this year as but his body wasn’t happening. We hung out with him talking and squished into the campsite. He had apparently thrown up 100 times in the past four days, and told us some pretty extraordinary stories. He didn’t have a tent, and then complain about all the ants crawling all over him, we didn’t know what he expected. I wonder too am. He left after not puking on us, which was great. And Shannon I went to sleep in the soft leaves with scrub oak leaves and acorns falling and little critters wrestling through the brush.
