PCT Day 58
Mile: 668.7 to 693.5
June 27 2021
Start: Spanish Needle Creek.
Finish: Mantet Creek tentsite, aka the scorpion kingdom.
Shannon and I left camp late in the morning as it was so nice and shady and quiet that we were able to enjoy the place in peace. True to his word, Lickety Split had left camp at 2am to slowly night hike out the 10 miles to a road where he was going to get picked up by a Trail Angel in the mid morning and get checked out at a hospital for dehydration and heat exhaustion. We hoped he had made it out okay and we both were worried that there was a chance that we’d find him passed out on the trail. Luckily we didn’t run into him, assuming that he had made it to the road to get evacuated from the hot desert and wished him all the best in his recovery.
We started hiking after hiker Skyline who we met yesterday came grumping up the hill. It was only 8am and he was already complaining about how slow his partner was and then tried to guilt us for only hiking 6 miles last night instead of 10. Talk about a Debbie Downer! Wah waahhhhh. We suggested that maybe he’d be happier if he was honest with his hiking partner about her slow pace making his trip miserable. This was the third or fourth time he’d complained about her in the less than 24 hours since we’d met him. Immediately Skyline retorted, “Oh no, I couldn’t tell her the truth.” But he sure could complain and talk sh*t about his hiking partner to complete strangers! His bad vibes weren’t something we wanted to deal with and hiked as fast as we could away from him, hoping we wouldn’t have to see him again. We left him and his curmudgeonly ways behind since it was way too early to be complaining already.
Today’s highlights were that we only had 2 days left in the desert and that we hiked over an 8000 foot mountain. Yay! We panicked slightly when we stopped for water at a stream that was supposed to be flowing on the trail but had since disappeared underground due to the drought. We were both out of water but tried to stay calm to figure out what our options were to stay hydrated. When we walked upstream there was still no sign of water having been there for a long time – everything was dried up sand and burnt grasses and dessicated reeds. We paused, and read the comments on the Guthook navigation app about the water source, discovering that we had missed a side trail to the water. Backtracking away from the stream bed, we treaded down a faint side trail where we luckily found a spot where the stream was still flowing gorgeously before it dived back underground. Hooray – we weren’t going to die from dehydration!
While our water filtered, we found a solid shade spot for lunch under some sticky pine trees where we relaxed. I rehydrated chili and rice with a tuna packet on the side for lunch while Shannon ate five granola bars. Gross! I can’t look at him when he’s shoving back-to-back granola bars down his pie hole. It’s nauseating.
We laid in the shade for a bit during the hottest part of the day but didn’t want to linger too long to avoid the drama of Skyline talking crap about his hiking partner. After lunch, we ran-hiked up the mountains where I got a bit dizzy in the heat so we sat and had a snack for a little while in the shade of some boulders. At one point we saw flakes of obsidian on the ground next to the cliffs and took a few minutes to look more at the shards of sharp rocks. We got distracted by them momentarily as we had just seen in the Kernville museum that the Native Americans in the area used to trade for obsidian to carve tools, arrowheads and spears from. For the next 30 minutes we searched for intact arrowheads and tools in the cliffs but just found chipped tool flakes carved by Native Americans hundreds or thousands of years ago. It was so cool to find these right next to the Pacific Crest Trail!
We collected some of the obsidian flakes and tool pieces and set up a display on the side of the trail for other hikers to see. We knew that we had miles to go before the next water source so we continued on down the trail to get the heck out of the desert. The rest of the afternoon we trekked up, up, up and over an 8,000-foot-tall desert mountain that never seemed to end. We didn’t see anyone for the whole day except grumpy old Skyline for a few minutes at the beginning of the day. There was no one else around so I blasted music from my iPhone because I needed to get pumped up to finish the freakin hot, dry and barren desert. At one point I was jamming out so hard that I dropped my phone and it slid 20 feet down the mountain on a sandy landslide. Somehow I managed to grab the phone before it went over a cliff and Shannon just shook his head at me.
Nothing much else exciting happened as we descended the mountain, and we were a bit nervous to camp at the tentsite in the valley below at the water source. A few weeks ago, hikers had left comments in the Guthook app about being harassed by black bears at this campsite even when they hung their food up in the trees. To be super safe, Shannon and I ate dinner far away from our tent site, and set up our tent a ways away from the creek so as not to put pressure on the wildlife that needed to drink from it.
As we were eating dinner on the warm rocks several hundred yards from our tent, a 3-inch-long scorpion scampered across the rocks only a few feet from us before we noticed it. Shannon jumped up and went to go shoo the scorpion away with a stick. While he was dispatching the scorpion, I put my hand down and saw another scorpion hiding in our water filter bag next to my hand. I screamed and bolted up. Shannon grabbed a bigger stick to push the first scorpion away, but it ran so impossibly fast towards me that Shannon had no choice but to grab the stick and try to fling the scorpion away. Like a devil bug possessed the scorpion kept coming back to us and started violently stinging the stick in Shannon’s hand. Unfortunately, that meant Shannon had to dispatch the first scorpion as it moved too aggressively and quickly at us to let it be. The second scorpion tried to crawl under more of my stuff and I started dancing and hollering in the dark trying to not get stung by its venomous stinger. Shannon also smushed the second scorpion and we packed up our stuff and ended dinner quickly to avoid any more scorpion kings coming at us.
Dinner went from somewhat nerve-wracking looking out for aggressive black bears fond of hiker food to full on stressful trying not to get stung by these damn scorpions that appeared out of nowhere. I could not wait for the desert section of the Pacific Crest Trail to be freaking over. We shoved our food in our food bags while Shannon hung the bear line away from our tent way high up in a tree. We hoisted our food bags 30 feet up in the air and quickly collected our things to head to bed, watching fastidiously the whole time for scorpions.
Shannon and I dashed across the creek, hopped in the tent and brought all of our stuff (including our packs) so we wouldn’t wake up to scorpions inside our backpacks, like creepy poisonous Cracker Jack prizes. Earlier I had seen old black bear prints around the sandy tentsites but we hoped for the best that evening and that any bears in the area would leave us alone. We played music during dinner, which must have been enough to keep the animals away and we had a very peaceful evening after the scorpions were taken care of.
