PCT Part 4: Friends

Day 7

Today’s miles: 9
Total miles: 85.3

Jess and I were both still feeling a bit wrung out from the travails of the past week, especially our marathon day to escape the storm.

So we decided to treat ourselves to an easy day out of Stagecoach, which we were in no hurry to leave.

I replaced the tent’s broken guyline while Jess organised our food and dropped some surplus supplies in the hiker box. They included about a glassful of California Pinot we hadn’t finished from last night’s bottle. This trail really is changing us!

As Jess was packing up stuff on a picnic table, a Mini pulled up to her. “Do you guys need a ride back to the trail?” asked the woman driving. She was a trail angel from San Diego named – you guessed it – Mini.

Her timing was great, and saved us having to hitch on the quiet country highway that connects Stagecoach to the trail.

The first mile or so were easy, flat walking. Then we crossed the highway, and hiked under an overpass where there was trail magic.

A woman was singing while a man played a violin next to a table full of food and drink. I took a ripe orange and a “green drink” which was a mixture of fruit juice and blended vegetables.

The trail angels said they were from the “Yellow Deli”. “We’re a tribe,” said a man holding a baby girl on his lap. The singing woman and the violin player started talking about Bible verses. “What we need is for everyone to see that there’s love in the world, and it needs to be undeniable,” the man said to another hiker. “It needs to be beyond any doctrine.”

We thanked them for the snacks and hiked on. As soon as we rounded a corner I Googled the Yellow Deli. It’s run by a fringe religious group called “The Twelve Tribes”, founded by Elbert Spriggs (who called himself ‘Yoneq’) in Tennessee in the 1970s. Twelve Tribes members live together in communes, and work unpaid at the Yellow Deli to fund their church.

I’ve done a lot of reporting on cults in my day job as a newspaper journalist. I couldn’t help but think of the baby girl on the man’s lap, and what kind of future she had in store for her. Would she be working at a Yellow Deli one day? Or would she find a way to get out?

Soon our thoughts turned back to the trail, as it began a steady climb into the San Felipe Hills. My pack strained at my shoulders, weighed down by four litres of water I was carrying to get me through a 14-mile dry stretch.

The terrain was the true desert: Barrel cacti, flowering succulents, and a fuzzy-looking, many-limbed cactus called teddy bear cholla. We had to be careful not to brush against any of the spikier plants that hugged the trail.

The PCT guidebook says the arid landscape is the result of rain shadow from the Volcan Mountains, which we had a great view of as we climbed. “Moisture-laden Pacific storms dump their rain on the higher Volcan Mountains, leaving little for the San Felipe Hills,” read the guide.

We climbed along the mountain ridge for nine miles, before setting up camp at a beautiful, flat site in a saddle with views of distant mountain ranges in both directions.

We were completely exposed to the wind, as so much of the trail has been, but the weather was mercifully calm.

Just before bed I received a text from Karen and Bob, two friends from the Palm Springs area who offered to host us at their place when we reached Highway 74.

Bob was my hospital roommate back in 2019, when I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation after an episode on Mount San Jacinto. He and Karen took me in when I had nowhere else to go. They are two of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and I’ve stayed in touch with them ever since.

“Wanted to let you & Jess know we are planning a small get together next Sunday here for our friends to meet greet & eat with you guys” Karen wrote.

We’d aimed to get to their house on Thursday afternoon, which meant we’d spend three whole days off trail if we were to stay until Sunday.

I suppose one must suffer for one’s fans.

Did I mention they have a jacuzzi?

Day 8

Today’s miles: 15.8
Total miles: 101.1

My hip ached in the night, but my tired brain didn’t pay it much mind. When I woke up, I discovered the reason: My sleeping mat had deflated in the night. Uh oh.

The pad was five years and hundreds of sleeps old – I’d got it from a Thermarest rep at Trail Days in 2019. He (generously) gave it to me as a free replacement for the first one I wore out.

I had good mobile reception at camp, so I got online and ordered a replacement to be sent to our next stop in Indio. It was five days away.

I tried not to think about the possibility of several nights of sleeping on the cold, hard ground as we packed up and ate a Mountain House granola breakfast.

We set off towards our first stop, a water cache five miles down the trail. It’s the only water supply for about 25 miles between Scissors Crossing and Barrel Spring. The cache is maintained by local trail angels who drive in pallets of water bottles on rutted jeep roads. Without them, hikers would have to carry painfully heavy loads to get them through the San Felipe Hills.

I love this part about the PCT community. People help each other, because everyone recognises that nobody can truly hike this trail alone. We’re all trying to do this incredibly difficult thing, and just about everybody understands it’s a lot easier to work together. If you bought a full size bottle of shampoo in a trail town because that’s all that was available, you leave it in the hiker box for others to use. If you notice something on trail that others should know about, you leave a comment on FarOut. If you get a hitch, you always ask the driver if they’ve got more room for the next hikers waiting. And if you take water from the Third Gate water cache, you leave a donation in the honesty box to pay for the next delivery. There is no trading or bartering, you just share what you have and ask for what you need.

Sunbaking by the cache were three hikers we hadn’t yet met: Boombox, Buttercup, and Biscuits. They’d hiked the Appalachian Trail together, and had reunited to hike the PCT. We shared some jokes, swapped storm stories, then pushed on.

The trail wound its way along the ridge, offering views of the Voltan Mountains before skipping over to the other side of the range, facing a valley of farmland.

At around 4.30 we reached the 100-mile marker. Just 2550 to go! We savoured the milestone, then a slow descent down to Barrel Spring, where the desert scrub gave way to a green meadow shaded by oak trees. There were dozens of tents scattered around the first water source in miles.

I set up our tent in a sandy wash. A bearded man in a Santa suit wandered by, and asked us if we wanted to give him our trash. He was Bad Santa, a 2016 thru hiker from San Diego who had brought trail magic – in the form of an esky full of beers.

Jess and I had a can of PBR each while we ate dinner, and Bad Santa told us about the evils of rodenticide, which had nearly killed off the endangered California Condor.

I returned to the tent to find my sleeping mat completely deflated. I blew it up again and tried to listen for the leak. No luck. Resigned to my fate, I stuffed our sit pads and some clothing under my hip and settled in for a cold and uncomfortable night.

Day 9

Today’s miles: 11.3
Total miles: 112.5

My night wasn’t quite as bad as I’d worried. I woke up for a long, shivery stretch around midnight, but still managed about five hours of sleep all up.

Jess fretted over me in the morning, insisting I swap with her for a lie-in. Her mat felt outrageously comfortable after my night on the ground.

Then an idea! The campsite had a water trough, fed by the spring, which might help me locate the leak. I peeled back our ice-covered tent flap, fumbled my shoes onto my feet with frozen fingers, and hustled over to the trough.

I plunged the mat into the icy water and immediately spied a thin stream of bubbles emanating from a crease. On closer inspection, it looked like something had torn a couple of small gouges out of the fabric.

I applied a patch from our repair kit, but wasn’t confident it would hold. We decided to buy super glue in Warner Springs, just 8 miles away.

The trail left the verdant spring and soon passed into an entirely new environment for us: open rangeland. We could see for miles across the gently undulating landscape. Wind made the grasses shimmer.

Six miles in we reached Eagle Rock, a huge stone formation that looks uncannily like an eagle with wings spread. Gliders towed up from the nearby Warner Springs gliderport circled lazily overhead.

Unbeknownst to us, we’d timed our arrival perfectly for a solar eclipse. A couple of other (much more organised) hikers had brought eclipse glasses, and offered us a peek. It was only a partial eclipse in California (full in Texas) but I still had a clear view of the moon obscuring the sun.

We pressed on, and reached Warner Springs in time for lunch. This place was one of the highlights of my previous hike, thanks to its community resource centre.

Back then the centre was a honeypot for hikers, offering space to relax out of the weather, places to charge devices, a small hiker store, camping, and even bucket showers and laundry.

Now the centre was behind a chain link fence, with a sign warning hikers to keep out.

Apparently, the community centre is on land leased from the local school district, and the district’s lawyers got antsy about liability. Now all Warner Springs has to offer hikers is a gas station and a post office. Sad.

We stopped in at the post office to collect our first resupply package from Enia, our friend back in San Francisco. She’d added a couple of sweet treats we weren’t expecting. It felt wonderful to receive an act of kindness from a friend after my rough night.

We bought hot dogs and super glue from the gas station, and took them to a picnic table where a group of other hikers were organising their resupply.

I glued some more patches on to the sleeping mat, blew it back up, and – gingerly – lay down on it. After five minutes, it was still fully inflated. I could have kissed it.

We got chatting to the other hikers, Felix (German), KP and U-Turn (Americans), and Ed (British) who had been hiking together since their very early start in mid March.

They’d run into snow and winter weather, so they’d hitched all around southern California ticking off snow-free sections where they could.

They were, as western suburbs school mums like to say, “our kind of people”, so we stuck with them for the road walk out of town.

We all made it to a beautiful campsite by a creek by late afternoon. I set up our tent beneath a huge, gnarled tree, while Jess made dinner.

Somebody started a campfire, so we all huddled around and swapped trail war stories before drifting off to our tents.

Day 10

Today’s miles: 14.4
Total miles: 126.9

Jess woke up with a puffy eye, after getting some grit in it the night before. She was in pain. I worried we should turn around and seek medical help before hiking deeper into the wilderness.

We’d camped next to Felix, who is a pharmacist back in Germany. I caught him brushing his teeth. “Would you mind having a look at Jess’s eye?” He took a quick glance and was unconcerned. “I have drops for that,” he told us, to our great relief. He rummaged around in his pack and produced a small vial of eye drops.

Jess dropped one in each eye. Half an hour later the pain was almost gone.

There’s a saying on the PCT: The trail provides.

We spent the morning rock hopping back and forth across Agua Caliente Creek as the trail wound maddeningly along alternating banks.

After a couple of miles we stopped at a small stream that flowed into the creek, where Jess collected water flowing out of a culvert.

We were soon joined by Slim, an older, taller hiker with a short white beard who wore glasses, a baseball cap and a grey sun hoody.

We’d crossed paths with Slim a few times over the preceding days, but never had a proper conversation. He joined us for the next few miles and told us a little about his life.

He was a retired IT worker from Florida who was hiking with his 30-something daughter, Shade, who was farther along on the trail. “Like the expression ‘throwing shade’,” he explained. “She hikes a lot faster than me.”

Soon the trail began a long, arduous climb up to the delightfully-named Bucksnort Mountain, where water was scarce. We were aiming for Mike’s Place, a trail angel’s property where tank water was available.

“You call this a fucking switchback?” panted Jess as we slogged up the 3000-foot climb. “Just get me a ladder”.

We were stopped for a drinks break after a particularly tough ascent when we heard the unmistakeable sound of a sobbing woman coming up behind us. It was Ruth, a hiker we’d been leapfrogging for the last week. We must have looked concerned.

“This is emotional,” she explained between tears. “I’m working through a lot of shit.” She trudged onwards and around a corner, then let out a guttural scream. We saw hikers up on the next switchback turn around and start running towards her.

We baked in the afternoon sun as we continued climbing ever higher above the Warner Valley. We could see gliders circling around its grassy floor.

Jess’s ankle gave her grief, then my lower back started to complain. The relentless uphill trudge was taking its toll.

We ran into Shade and her friends eating lunch at a campsite. Slim joined them, and we continued on.

Soon after, I ran into another hiker named Rizz – an eternally cheerful guy from Oklahoma with a permanent grin and a southwestern drawl.

Two things surprised me about Rizz: He wasn’t wearing his pack, and he was going the wrong way. “I left my fanny pack behind when I stopped for lunch,” he explained. “But it’s ok, I’ve got to get my steps up”.

He later found it three miles behind, adding six miles to an already brutal day. I don’t think I would have been quite so cheery.

We were both feeling the strain as we neared Mike’s Place around 6pm. Jess was hobbling, and I was trying to breathe through my back pain. We were both exhausted.

Mike’s Place has always been one of the weirder stops on the PCT. The rundown property is at the end of a long dirt road on the side of Bucksnort Mountain, surrounded by Anza-Borrego State Park.

Bowling balls, car parts, and rusting furniture littered the yard. A life-size plastic skeleton sat in a chair, enjoying the view of the valley below. “Welcome PCT Class of 2022” read a sign. Mike wasn’t home.

Nonetheless, the water tank was full and there were plenty of flat tent sites. We ate a rushed dinner, both of us aching to lie down. We finally collapsed into the tent, with hips, knees and feet throbbing.

I downed some painkillers and an edible gummy I’d bought from a dispensary in San Diego, then passed out.

Day 11

Today’s miles: 13.2
Total miles: 140.2

We rolled out of Mike’s Place after a long sleep, both feeling at least partially refreshed after our long struggle the day before.

The elevation profile promised a much easier day that was mostly downhill.

Turns out that downhill does not equal easy. Much of the trail was on a side slant through dense overgrowth. It was slow going, and hard work.

The steep mountain slopes didn’t leave many flat spots for a break, so we sat down awkwardly on the side of the trail while had a morning snack.

Soon we were joined by Zosia, a 23-year-old engineer from California who started at the Mexican border on the same day as us: March 31.

She hiked with us for the rest of the day, and was great conversation. Jess and I had been in each other’s company 24/7 for nearly three weeks, so we were desperate for anyone with new thoughts.

Zosia turned out to be an encyclopedia on California desert plant life, which I’d been learning a little about from the PCT handbook.

As we walked she pointed out white sage, the ever-present chamise bush, juniper trees (laden with berries), yucca, and the glove-shaped beavertail prickly pear.

At lunch, Ruth caught up with us again. She seemed to be in better spirits than the day before, when she’d screamed into the void. “The man that I love is up in Idyllwild,” she told us. “We were supposed to start together but we separated. I’m trying to catch up to him because I didn’t get any closure.” She strode on.

Late in the afternoon we veered off trail to reach Tule Spring, the last reliable water source before Highway 74 (excepting a foul-looking cistern). Hikers were gathered around the spring, resting in the shade while waiting out the heat.

Rizz was relaxing in a camp chair he has lugged with him since Campo.

We took a combined nine litres from the spring and “camelled up” (chugged water) before setting off again.

All three of us were moving slowly as we neared the bottom of the long descent. Three miles later we reached the bottom of Nance Canyon, where we pitched our tents in a sandy wash.

Day 12

Today’s miles: 11.6
Total miles: 151.8

Jacuzzi Day! Shower Day! Bob and Karen Day!

But most importantly: Jess’s birthday!

We woke up just 11 miles from Highway 74, where we planned to hitch down to see our friends in the Coachella Valley.

Jess and I were both filthy, smelly, achey, and in need of a good rest and a hot meal that didn’t come out of a foil bag.

Motivated, we skipped our normal morning snooze and got up with the sun. Breakfast was a protein bar. No time for oatmeal! We were on trail by 7am, our earliest start yet. Zosia had just emerged from her tent when we got going.

The day started with a steep 1000-foot climb up to the foothills of Anza, a desert town famous for its spring wildflowers. Justin, a young German hiker, raced past us on the climb. “I hate hills!” he puffed. “The faster I go the sooner they are over!”

Justin was part of a trail family that was a bit unusual, in that they were also a real-life family. His aunt, Brave Mum, a dreadlocked woman who spoke little English, had wanted to hike the trail for years. Somehow she had persuaded Justin and her two sons, Patrick and Tim, to join her.

Patrick and Tim are both Germans from Central Casting: Barrel-chested with bushy beards. They look like identical twins, but are not. Justin, who I suspect is the baby of the group, is always racing ahead.

Zosia caught up to us partway up the climb, and stayed with us for the rest of the morning. We all had a rocket under us. We were heading to a shower, Zosia was heading to a hot meal at Paradise Valley Cafe, the only restaurant for an 80-mile stretch of trail.

We reached the highway in record time. We were so early that it was only lunchtime, so we decided to join Zosia at the cafe, a mile off the trail. Fortunately for us her mum Dierdre, who was visiting family in Los Angeles, had decided to stop by on her drive home to the Bay Area. She gave us all a ride to the cafe and insisted on treating us to lunch. If only everybody could have a trail mum!

Dierdre’s car was loaded with snacks and treats she’d bought to give to other hungry hikers, many of whom were at the cafe. “Take as much as you want!” she insisted. “I bought it to give away!” I’m constantly amazed at the kindness people show PCT hikers.

All talk at the cafe was about the trail ahead, particularly the treacherous traverse of Apache Peak on the side of Mount San Jacinto. Snow and ice still covered Apache’s north face, where the trail cut across a steep mountain slope. In 2020, a young man named Trevor “Microsoft” Laher died at this spot after sliding 200m down the mountain. He’d attempted the crossing without microspikes, which, tragically, were waiting for him at the next post office in Idyllwild.

A recent comment on FarOut didn’t inspire much confidence. “Just don’t,” wrote Johnny Appleseed. “Dear god going across that section is possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life”.

With temperatures in the 20s, the big melt is well and truly on, so Jess and I won’t have to make a decision until we rejoin the trail on Monday. Zosia planned to hike to Apache Peak, eyeball it, and take the Spitler Peak Trail alternate if she didn’t like what she saw.

We wished her good luck, and stuck our thumbs out on the highway shoulder. Within minutes we were picked up by a Jeep heading down the mountain. The driver, Chad, was a gardener / handyman and amateur gold prospector heading home from a job in San Diego. As luck would have it he was heading to Indio, right near Bob and Karen’s.

He dropped us off at a petrol station, where Bob picked us up. I hadn’t seen him in five years. He greeted us both with a hug.

Then it was over to “Villa Indio”, as Karen calls it, in their gated retirement community at Shadow Hills.

Our friends took us out for a dinner at an excellent Mexican restaurant, where we toasted Jess’s 33rd. The servers surprised her with a birthday ice cream (featuring candle), a Spanish language “happy birthday”, and an enormous pink sombrero.

We downed jumbo-sized margaritas (everything is bigger in America) before heading home way past our usual bedtime at 9pm.

We collapsed into bed, tired but clean and happy, looking forward to not hiking tomorrow.