PCT Part 5: Detour

Days 13-15

Life in the desert with Bob and Karen was glorious and lazy. Gloriously lazy.

Our hosts dropped everything to show us a good time, starting with a birthday dinner for Jess at a lively Mexican restaurant. After a wink and a nod from Karen, the staff serenaded Jess with ‘Happy Birthday’ and perched an enormous pink sombrero on her head. ¡Feliz cumpleaños!

Bob and Karen drove us around to do resupply errands, took us on a tour of Palm Springs and fired up their jacuzzi whenever we felt like soaking our aching feet.

Worryingly, Jess’s feet were still aching a little more than they should after a couple of days off trail. We wondered if she was suffering from achilles tendonitis.

We both loved the Palm Springs area, which is full of beautiful mid century homes on avenues lined with palm trees, set against the backdrop of snowy mountains. Buses disgorged hundreds of fabulously-dressed Coachella-goers onto the streets. Jess was in love. “I could live here,” she said.

Bob took us out for a run on his golf cart, which he uses to drive to the gym in the gated retirement community. Jess had a go on the drive back, hitting a whopping 25mph.

On our last day, Bob and Karen invited more than a dozen of their neighbours and friends around for a lunch party to bid us farewell. Karen had even organised a cake with “Happy Trails Ben & Jess” written in frosting.

Their kindness was something special.

Day 16

Today’s miles: 10.8
Total miles: 162.7

Karen made us an early-morning cooked breakfast as we packed. “I’ve changed my mind,” Jess announced. “I want to stay here.”

We hugged Karen goodbye. I was looking forward to getting back on trail but I was really going to miss these guys.

Bob drove us out to Highway 74 and dropped us at the base of the road’s climb into the mountains. It only took about five minutes to get a hitch.

The driver was a young guy from San Diego driving home from Coachella. He’d never heard of the PCT, and was amazed we were walking all the way to Canada.

“I’ve been on a break from reality too,” he said. “But it’s not hiking, it’s ripping ketamine and doing molly with the boys.”

He dropped us at the trailhead and we set off. Jess’s achilles pain hadn’t dulled that much despite the three days off, so we started slow.

Within minutes we ran into Tabea, the German woman we’d hiked with for several days before Julian. She had taken a few days off in Idyllwild. I’d expected our three days off would have put us behind the friends we’d made, so it was a nice surprise to immediately see a friendly face.

Tabea had picked up a trail crew that included Jamie, the 18 year-old-guy we met at Scout and Frodo’s, plus two American guys named Spencer and Baby Beef.

The group soon overtook us as we began our climb towards San Jacinto. The landscape was a different kind of desert, blending chaparral shrubs with towering pines. Huge boulders dwarfed us.

We stopped for lunch (Bob and Karen’s Italian beef sandwiches) at a patch of flat ground with a vista of the hills behind us. Even after just a couple of hours we’d climbed quite far.

Jess’s achilles was still limiting her. “I’m worried,” she said. I sent a Facebook message to Blaze, a travelling physio who follows the hiker bubble up the trail. She told me she would be in Idyllwild when we arrived on Wednesday. I booked an appointment for Jess.

My lower back didn’t like the slower pace so we agreed to hike at our own paces and meet every couple of miles.

Remnant patches of snow began to flank the trail as it reached 6800 feet. They would only get deeper as we approach San Jacinto. Soon after we get our first view of Lake Hemet. The air became cold and crisp.

The climb became steeper, and my left achilles began to show its own signs of strain. Pins and needles from my sciatica began to tickle my left foot.

Jess was stressing about her foot and took some of my extra-strength paracetamol. I was also worried about her. The mood was a little glum.

Some music lifted my spirits as we climbed higher, and got our first panoramic views of Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley.

I made it to Cedar Spring Junction around 4.30. Tabea and company were camped there. A side trail led 0.4 miles down to the spring, which required a lot of bush bashing to reach.

Jess arrived about half an hour after me. Her general pain had become “slicing”, she said, and she’d hobbled much of the last few miles.

There wasn’t much space to pitch our tent, so we decided to try our first cowboy camp. Jess discovered that our quilt can clip to the straps that hold our sleeping mats together, preventing it from pulling up and letting in draughts. Revolutionary!

Day 17

Today’s miles: 3.9
Total miles: 166.6

It was a chilly night in our cowboy camp, but we both managed a decent enough sleep.

Morning brought bad news.

“I can’t put any weight on my right foot,” said Jess, wincing as she maneuvered herself upright. I helped her over to a plank to sit on while I made breakfast. The mood was grim.

We heard a couple of southbound hikers approaching us. It was Altitution and Tammy! They’d hitched into Idyllwild and were completing this section southbound.

Altitution had KT tape, and showed Jess how to strap it to release some of the strain on her achilles. Altitution is always cheery, and his visit lifted our spirits.

Jess took a few test steps around camp and seemed to have regained some movement. We didn’t have much choice, so we packed up and set off.

Chilly mountain wind buffeted us as we crept slowly up the trail towards Apache Peak. The trail was littered with blown-down trees, slowing our progress even more.

After three hours we’d barely made it four miles. “I think this is my worst morning on the PCT,” Jess said. I felt the same. While rummaging through Jess’s pack’s mesh pocket looking for painkillers, I got frustrated and began tossing things carelessly onto the ground. A Ziploc bag of M&Ms exploded when it landed, scattering them among the grass.

Our initial plan was to try and make it to the Devil’s Slide Trail into Idyllwild, about 15 miles away, over the next two days. After Jess’s foot pain deteriorated we decided to take the Spitler Peak exit trail and hitch down to Idyllwild from the trailhead.

By the time we got to Fobes Saddle, at 11AM, the junction to the five-mile Spitler Peak trail was still two miles away, and thousands of feet above us.

There was another exit trail from Fobes, but comments on FarOut suggested it terminated at a dirt road with very little traffic.

I phone Grumpy, a local trail angel who had given us his card a few days earlier at the Paradise Valley Cafe. “Take Fobes,” he advised. “There’s a hundred downed trees over Spitler Peak”. I asked Grumpy if he could pick us up from the trailhead, but he said he could only meet us at the highway. “I drove down Fobes Ranch Road once, I won’t do it again,” he said. “I’ve only got a Subaru.”

We hiked down. It was a comparatively easy descent, but our hearts were heavy. Jess was frustrated with her achilles and sad at the prospect of losing touch with friends we knew were only a few miles ahead of us on the PCT.

Prickly pears and teddy bear cholla (I love saying that name) took the place of pine trees as we climbed down off the ridge.

We had lunch by a creek and basked in the sun, trying to lift our spirits. When we reached Fobes Ranch Road I could see why Grumpy was reluctant to drive it. It was basically a four-wheel drive track, full of deep ruts and potholes.

We trudged the four miles to the highway in the desert heat. I got a glimmer of reception, so I phoned the Silver Pines Lodge in Idyllwild and asked if we could check in a day early. Then a text from Grumpy: he would meet us at the base of the mountain road.

I walked ahead of Jess and finally emerged onto the river plain by the highway, where Grumpy was waiting. I thanked him profusely, dumped my pack, and jogged back up the road to take Jess’s.

Then Grumpy drove us into Idyllwild. It’s one of my favourite towns on the PCT, so it was hard to be too miserable as we checked into the Silver Pines.

We had showers and changed into our sleeping clothes, which were still clean after just one night on the trail. We (slowly) walked a block over to Idyllwild Pizza Company for dinner.

There we met a group of other hikers who were all new to us, and later Altitution and Tammy, who had just finished their section and hitched back into town. We hobbled back to the hotel and got an early night, both glad to be somewhere safe but anxious about what the physio would tell us tomorrow.

Days 18-23

Blaze and her four-legged assistant, Honey, turned up at the Silver Pines Lodge early in the afternoon.

She poked and prodded Jess’s right foot while we talked about the trail. “It doesn’t seem like it’s your achilles,” she concluded. “It might be a stress fracture.”

Shit.

“Would that be a hike ender?” I asked for both of us.

Blaze said it would take four to eight weeks to fully heal, if it was indeed a stress fracture. She suggested an X-ray, but warned it may not be able to detect the fracture if it was still in its early stages of healing.

Blaze had all sorts of helpful suggestions that only a thru-hiker would think of: there was a walk-in clinic in nearby Rancho Cucamonga, an immobilising boot ordered from Amazon would arrive in two days, and there were second-hand crutches available for free at the Idyllwild Thrift Store.

Other hobbling hikers had snapped up all the crutches by the time I walked over, but there were a couple of Zimmer frames available to borrow.

Jess spent the whole day more or less immobilised in bed, but the Zimmer frame at least allowed her to get around the room without crawling.

She was devastated at the diagnosis. “I miss my friends,” she said, referring to the many hikers we’d befriended who were gradually getting further and further in front of us.

I knew how she felt.

I had an eerily similar experience in Idyllwild in 2019. It was here that my heart first started beating out of rhythm. That arrythmia landed me in hospital, and at the time it seemed like it was going to end my hike then and there. After years of preparation, the thought of being forced to quit after only two weeks is truly crushing.

“It’s any thru-hiker’s nightmare,” another hiker later told me.

I was gutted for Jess, but wasn’t as devastated at the prospect of my own hike ending. I’d been here before, and was at peace with the prospect of our journey taking a different direction. The PCT was no longer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me.

I spent some time looking up alternatives to make our PCT savings last the five months they were intended. Should we go stay with family in Chicago for a while? Or go live for cheap in Mexico or Southeast Asia?

Ultimately our thoughts turned to the short term. We didn’t want to make any rash decisions before we knew for sure what was going on with Jess’s foot. Moping around in a hotel room for a week wasn’t an option. For one, it was too expensive – and not very fun.

I had another idea. “What if we rented a car and went trail angeling?”

And so the next morning I hitchhiked alone down to Hemet, the nearest town with a rental car agency. I drove back up the mountain in our Angelmobile, a silver Chevy Trax – with a pair of Walmart crutches in the boot.

We checked out of the Silver Pines and borrowed some scissors, a marker and some tape from them. I turned the cardboard box the crutches came in into a crude sign.

We were the Paddles ‘N Jess Express! Our spirits lifted as we set off to find some hikers (affectionately known as hikertrash for their ragged appearance and all-around helplessness) who needed rides.

It wasn’t a long search. Almost immediately, we found a young American man who needed a lift back to the Highway 74 trailhead. When we dropped him off 30 minutes later we ran into a man named Chad and his 81-year-old father who were hiking a 100-mile section, and wanted a ride to Paradise Valley Cafe.

We got the idea of recording a short video with each hiker we shuttled, capturing why they were hiking the PCT. “I’m hiking the PCT with my 81-year-old dad on the off chance he’ll tell me he loves me before he dies,” Chad wept into the camera, not at all sincerely.

Over the next three days we ferried more than 70 hikers all over the mountains. Many wanted to go into Idyllwild from Highway 74, or the reverse. Others were going to the foot of the Devil’s Slide, a more direct route into Idyllwild, but one that requires hikers to negotiate a two-mile-long series of steep off-trail switchbacks.

Many hikers we dropped off were nervous about the treacherous snow and ice that still blanketed the trail near the peak of Mount San Jacinto. An eight-mile stretch known as Fuller Ridge was a particular concern. Those that wanted to avoid it altogether hitched with us out to Black Mountain Road, a safer alternate route.

We drove hikers from the US, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, France, the Netherlands, Uruguay and Canada. Nearly everybody was happy to be in a video.

“I’m Johannes from Denmark, and I’m doing the PCT to be able to eat as much food as I possibly can,” said Johannes, from Denmark.

One evening we picked up two older men from the base of the Devil’s Slide trail who looked like they’d just come back from the trenches. They were so worn out they couldn’t even lift their packs into the car without help. “That snow was brutal,” one said. They’d been postholing up to their knees for miles.

We stopped in at the Idyllwild Brewpub for some beers at the end of a long day driving hikers around. There we met Anvil, a hiker from Colorado who had just finished the same section but had a very different experience. “I was having fun!” he said.

He also had a solution to our short-term problem of where to live. His in-laws lived on the coast in Dana Point, south of LA, and would be happy to put us up. We’d been staying in a local trail angel’s guest cottage, but didn’t want to impose for too long.

So we decided to return the rental car on Wednesday and head to the coast.

Jess’s foot was making noticeable progress. Five days after getting off trail, she was able to walk semi-normally with the help of a protective boot. We decided to hold off on the x-ray after some research. Stress fractures can be hard to detect in the early stages of healing, and the results wouldn’t alter the treatment (rest) anyway.

Before we left town I caught up with an old friend who I hiked with in 2019. Steinbeck, a hiker from Salinas on the California coast, was in the area doing some bouldering and hiking. He drove up the mountain to Idyllwild to see us for dinner.

He told Jess the story of our sleepless night camping in 50mph winds outside Mount Laguna. Since we last saw each other we’d both gotten married and lived through a pandemic. We were both still trying to knock off the PCT.