Day 43

18 miles

Of course, the desert is hot and dry, but damn! It hit 103 at lunch today. We sat underneath some old mining equipment, but the ants eventually got too numerous and we had to move elsewhere. The Joshua Tree we used next was a great new spot, but I couldn’t sit still and chose to keep moving instead of just baking sitting still. By luck, it was starting to get cloudy. We had a mile or so of downhill followed by about 4 uphill that was all sand. We’ve been in the desert for over 40 days, and today felt the hottest. Tomorrow is forecasted to be even hotter at 107. We’re gonna start super early, just like we did for the aquaduct, and race the sun. Also, today we relied entirely on water caches. The two are maintained by one guy who goes by Devilfish. He contributes a ton of information to the water report as well. Right before we went to bed (we were camping at the cache in some adjacent tent spots) he pulled up in his truck to check on the cache. Super nice guy and, again, wouldn’t take a donation. Pricepoint and Honeybear caught up to us, which was fun. I thought I saw Pricepoint the day we came out of Tehachapi, but we didn’t catch up to them that night so we couldn’t be sure. The next morning we passed by a tent that matched theirs, but we didn’t know if it was theirs. We suspected it was, and all of the trail registers ahead of that point were missing their names, so it seemed like we had passed them. No big deal, but they do bigger mile days and a double zero seemed out of character. So we assumed something had happened. Well, it turns out, they did double zero because Honeybear caught a cold and they’ve been taking it easy the past few days. Mystery solved, and yay! we know some people again. We’ve been between bubbles, which seems to be closely-tied to our town stops and relatively relaxed mileage. We can crush miles, but we don’t do it all the time. Some tramilies seem focused on going as fast as they can, and that’s cool too, but we’re just trying to keep going. We’re old! These college kids just blaze right past us and talk about doing 30s or 40s. No, thanks. I’m happy with teens for now, occasional 20s. We’ll (have to) ramp up more miles per day later on, after the Sierra.