PCT Day 60
June 29, 2021
Mile: 702.6 to 706.9 (4.3 miles)
Start: Grumpy Bear’s Retreat in Kennedy Meadows
Finish: South Fork Kern River Bridge
After a long night of listening to some large creature snuffling near our tent in the dark and trying to paw its way into a large plastic barrel nearby, we were a little on edge and sleep deprived in the morning. When the snuffling got louder and closer to us, my stomach dropped because I realized that our post office box full of food was just lying in the tent vestibule right next to where we were sleeping. In the dark, I tried wishfully thinking that the large sniffing animal would go away but I knew that it would probably be attracted to the scent of our food. When the chuffing and snuffling got a little too close for comfort, I woke up Shannon who agreed that the animal definitely sounded a lot like a black bear. We grabbed our food boxes and in the dark carefully picked our way across the dusty lot, walking to the bathroom while shining our headlamps around looking for red reflecting eyes from black bears. In the ladies room (which was marginally cleaner than the guys bathroom) we shoved our food boxes up against a window, closing the door right behind us. I’d rather have a mouse get into our food versus a bear because at least the mouse wouldn’t be able to eat everything in one go!
We sleepily shuffled back to our tent in the inky darkness with zero bear encounters. Just as we were about to fall asleep again, the dog across the street at Triple Crown Outfitters started barking like crazy. Bleary-eyed with adrenaline shooting through my veins, I sat up straining my ears to figure out if the dog was alerting us to a bear or other predator nearby. Long plaintive coyote calls answered in the fields where we’d searched for arrowheads earlier. A sigh of relief washed over me as I realized the dog was just barking at the coyotes and not a bear. The dog seemed to keep the coyotes at bay but definitely kept as awake as it howled and barked all night which also made it hard to sleep. The pack of wild coyotes seemed to be taunting the lone dog, mimicking his howling and barking patterns. It was definitely a restless night at the free tentsites behind Grumpy Bear’s restaurant but beggars can’t be choosers. At least the bears and coyotes left us alone.
We woke up just before the kitchen at Grump Bear’s opened for breakfast at 8am and shuffled on down to the restaurant for hot food. I grabbed a sausage, egg, potato and cheese burrito bowl and Shannon had a massive all-you-can-eat pancakes and eggs, sausage and potatoes. The pancake he was presented with was probably the largest pancake I’ve ever seen in my life. The pancake was the size of a pizza and as thick as a college textbook, a carb lover’s dream. As we chowed down on breakfast, we talked to a guy from L.A. who was visiting in the area for a week and he was asking all about the PCT. Joseph was his name, he was a funny guy who was hoping to move up to the wilderness when Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites went up so Internet access would be more reliable and faster.
Story time! After Joseph left, we hung out with Scott (the owner of Grump Bear’s) and his wife and laughed our butts off at their stories over the years. Some of my favorites are:
The terrorist “doctor” from Switzerland:
A Swiss “doctor” had been harassing the bar for several weeks from Switzerland this summer. Apparently this Swiss “doctor” had been hiking the PCT and went home early for one reason or another, and now was requesting that the bar immediately ship his stuff back. It’d be one thing if the items were valuable (ex: expensive tent or sleeping bag or something) but it was a pair of $10 dirty socks and $20 Microspikes, all the way back to Switzerland. This “doctor” didn’t provide an address to ship the items back to but continued to threaten the bar saying that if they didn’t send his stuff from the middle of nowhere USA 6,000 miles across two continents and an ocean by the end of July that he was going to keep writing bad reviews about the restaurant. He also wanted the bar to take care of opening up his packages, repacking them, exporting and paying the $30 customs fee to ship the package out. This ridiculously entitled and petty man kept getting all huffy at the owners of the bar via email making up some bull crap that it was illegal to not respond to his email within 24 hours. Despite the repeated responses from Grumpy Bear’s saying that his emails were going to spam so she wasn’t able to reply to them because she has a business to run and wasn’t checking her spam email box every few hours. He sounded kind of like a needy psychopathic baby – it was his fault he went home and left behind a few cheap belongings. If he truly was a doctor, he should be able to afford new socks and crampons easily. I told Scott and his wife that they should just email him back and say, “The United States does not negotiate with terrorists. The end.”
Scott and his wife laughed and laughed and we kept joking about all the crazy shit that they had gone through over the years. Since Kennedy Meadows is pretty remote it volunteers to take in thousands of PCT and JMT hiker packages each year.
The guy who had Grumpy Bear’s bar fix his fridge from 6,000 miles away:
A German guy who had gotten off of the PCT two years ago decided that he was going to take advantage of the Grumpy Bear’s package holding operations. He had a refrigerator with American parts that weren’t available in Germany or were really expensive or something. So he demanded that the bar receive all of his refrigerator spare parts, collect them, repackage them and then send them to Germany acting as his own personal exporter. It was so weird and they said that over the the course of 6 weeks they received dozens of packages of replacement fridge parts. At least the German guy provided money to pay for the customs fee and an actual address to send the fridge parts to.
The entitled guy who wanted Grumpy Bear’s to clean up after his carelessness by committing a felony:
There was also the guy who didn’t bring a tent with him on the Pacific Crest Trail, and when it started raining on him in the desert several hundred miles south of Kennedy Meadows, somehow it was Grumpy Bear’s Resort’s fault that he was getting rained on. I mean you don’t have a tent – what do you expect is going to happen when it rains? This dbag demanded that the bar send his tent that he ordered to their restaurant back to him 300 miles away. They weren’t going to open mail that wasn’t addressed to them and send it to some random guy on the phone since tampering with mail is considered a felony. Little punk didn’t like this very much and wrote bad reviews of the business which he never made it to. Scott and company just laughed it off and very much moved on with their lives.
I need my package NOW guy:
This year there was a guy who demanded during the middle of a very busy 70-person breakfast service that the owner and chef cooking the food for the entire 70+ group of hikers step away immediately from the kitchen because he absolutely needed his package he mailed to the bar now. They kindly asked the entitled dbag if he could wait till after breakfast service was done because it was just the two of them cooking, cleaning, serving and cashiering. This entitled hiker demanded his package now and wouldn’t take no for an answer. So, the chef announced to everybody that they were stopping breakfast service because of this guy to search for his package. People of course weren’t happy but the chef grabbed the dbag’s box and gave it to him, turning back to continue cooking for the 70 other hikers waiting for breakfast. The jerk opens his box, sets it aside and then proceeds to order breakfast like he had all the time in the world. What a freakin dick!
After story time about all the entitled hikers, Shannon and I spent the morning going to Yogi’s Triple Crown Outfitters across the street from Grumpy Bear’s. After figuring out some logistics and mileage, we resupplied at Yogi’s place, spending lots of time talking to Yogi about her double triple crown hikes (thru-hiking the Appalachian, Pacific Crest and Continental Divide Trails twice each), her dog’s life here in Kennedy Meadows and how her business was super niche and only existed during the PCT thru-hiking season. She gave us lots of good advice about upcoming mosquitoes and how to make it to Washington by the first week in October, etc. It was a really awesome experience meeting a thru-hiking legend!
Shannon and I returned to camp where we sorted through our food and gear and mailed off a package of extra food north to Tuolumne Meadows up in Yosemite National Park. We then sorted through our desert specific gear that we were going to send home like our silvery hiking umbrellas and snow gear that was no longer needed such as ice axes and microspikes. Yogi at Triple Crown Outfitters said with the low snowpack this year, she’d pulled microspikes and ice axes from her shelves about a month ago since the typically snow-covered trail ahead in the high Sierras melted much earlier than is usual. With the ongoing multi year drought in the area, we lucked out with not having to pack out snow gear. This made me a little nervous that the normally wet and snowy Sierra Nevada Mountains were already drying out so early in the season as it meant the risk of wildfire was going to be significant. Oh well, you can’t worry about what might happen in the future and just have to take the trail one day at a time!
At Grumpy Bear’s, I ate a lunch of salad and buffalo wings while Shannon chowed down on a yummy pizza called “The Meaty Wheaty” while we charged our electronics. We did enjoy lunchtime Bloody Marys and beer while we watched “Night at the Museum” on the huge screen TV in the restaurant. A rainstorm came through the tiny town, which was the first rain that the Kennedy Meadows had had in over four months. Everybody was so excited about the rain and was giving up to the minute real life updates on the status of the rain. It was super fun to watch everyone get so excited about rain! Shannon and I took a nap and read in the tent during the rainstorm which was super relaxing. We then decided to head back on trail after the forecast said we would be out of the thunderstorms for a while. We said goodbye to all of our new friends in Kennedy Meadows like Sam, the bartender gal who was super chill; Guino, bartender and PCT thru-hiker whose name was short for pinguino or the Spanish word for penguin; Scott the owner of Grumpy Bear’s and his wife; hilarious hiker Grieg, because she had thought the town of Agua Dulce was called Grieg Dulce; Gina who had visited with her mom in her hometown of Ridgecrest for a week; Diamond from New Orleans and the vibrant locals. Scott and his wife gave us a ride back to the trail, sad to see us go. Guino was super cool and told us to keep a lookout for arrowheads and to have a great life and have lots of handsome babies, lol.
Everyone thought it was so cool and funny that we’re going to get married on the top of Mount Whitney in a few days. We told fellow PCT hiker Grieg about our hike and made her laugh so hard about the outdoor museum that we had set up when we had found all the obsidian tool chips and put them on a rock for display next to the trail. She thought it was hilarious that we made the museum as she had passed by it yesterday and we told her how it was an interactive museum with all the tool chips scattered on different rock levels, and even some on display in the backyard of Grumpy Bear’s.
We said goodbye to Scott and his wife, thanking them profusely for their hospitality as they dropped us back off at the trailhead. Shannon reminded Scott to tell Tyler Sanchez that he sends his regards. Tyler Sanchez was the fake persona that a disgruntled local guy pretended to be who had beef against Grumpy Bear’s Retreat. This angry local tore down the Kennedy Meadows navigation signs on the trail and prank texted Scott pretending to be a PCT hiker needing a ride. Every day for a couple of weeks, this “Tyler Sanchez” guy would text Scott to ask for a ride from the PCT trailhead. When Scott would go pick up this Tyler Sanchez person, there was no one there. He quickly figured out which local resident was messing around with him in the small town of 80 people who live in Kennedy Meadows. After two weeks of ignoring the daily prank texts, Scott texted “Tyler Sanchez” back and said he’d be pulling up in the same make, model, year and color of car that the prankster owned. The prankster immediately got the picture and stopped messing with Scott after realizing he got caught.
This afternoon we only hiked 4 miles and camped out at a beautiful tucked away sandy spot under a large pine tree and rock next to the South Fork of the Kern River. We looked for arrowheads unsuccessfully and laughed at how much fun we had had at Grumpy Bear’s. We caught up to fellow hiker Diamond from New Orleans where Shannon jokingly proposed that he give Diamond a foot massage in the middle of the woods. I started playing my hiking poles like they were banjos from the movie “Deliverance” and Diamond looked startled, but then laughed at how crazy we were. He had a great sense of humor and said he wished he could camp with us but he had to move on to pick up a package 40 miles away before the post office closed for the long holiday weekend.
At camp, Shannon and I played on the rocks in the river, checking out the mini waterfalls and looking for trout. We didn’t want to let this river out of our sight after spending such a long time in the desert without water. Tomorrow we head up into some real elevation of the High Sierras which is so exciting!
